Oenbring / 1 Chapter 1: Introduction The norms of correctness in terminology adopted by followers of Bloomfield or Chomsky are especially influential and revealing. In this respect Whorf who as a fire insurance inspector noted the consequences of calling a vapor-filled drum ‘empty’ offered a permanent lesson to linguistics itself … Terminology, then, and representative anecdote, interact with the goals, practice, and commitment of linguistics to shape what is done … In a later period historians may discover that what was done and what was lastingly accomplished must be distinguished, and may conclude that terminology and anecdote, fused in the idiom or rhetoric of the approach, had more to do with what was done than with what was lastingly accomplished. The temptation is then to dismiss rhetoric as merely decorative and superficial. And superficial it is, to those who must discard it to find kernels they wish to use. But since no approach appears to succeed without a rhetoric, it would seem that it is not superficial, but a functional prerequisite. Hymes and Fought, American Structuralism Introduction To begin to tell the story of how argumentation and rhetorical positioning have played a central role in the history of linguistics in the past century with Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de Linguistique Général is, of course, to engage in a move that seems wholly opposed to what has been understood by many scholars to be one of that book’s Oenbring / 2 central insights; while one of the most novel moves of the Cours was to authorize the study of language and language practices without a search for origin (as had been the primary goal of most 19th Century scholars of language), to begin this study with the Cours seems to posit an origin for the story.1 (Indeed, I admit that beginning as such is largely a technique of exposition.) What’s more, the fact that the Cours has been such a captivating document to language scholars of many different orientations despite the fact that it is essentially an unauthored text (that is to say, it was compiled out of Saussure’s lecture notes edited and published by two of his colleagues after the author’s death) would, at first, seem to leave little room for the suggestion — the suggestion that this study intends to make — that rhetorical packaging, argumentation, and timing have played an important role in the history of modern ‘scientific’ linguistics. If, indeed, scholars have found the Cours a useful text, despite the fact that it should properly be read as unauthored,2 that would seem to present evidence in support of our common intuitions of how scholarly and especially scientific findings are adjudicated by subsequent scholars; the notions determined by later scholars to be ‘useful’ or ‘accurate’ are accepted and the rest discarded, with the adjudication of the propositions taking place without regard to the author’s style or packaging of the claims. That is to say, the Cours’ remarkable effect on the study of language in the 20th century despite its unauthored nature might seem to 1 Furthermore, although the notion of language as a social fact has been taken by many scholars to be one of the central innovations of the Cours, many scholars believe that this should be seen as evidence for the influence of Durkeim’s notion of a fait social on Saussure (Matthews 2001: 12). 2 That is to say, there exists no single, unified author that is the originating source of the text (see, for example, Foucault [1969 (1986)]). Oenbring / 3 support our traditional notions about scientific discourse: that the persona of the author plays no role in the reception of the scientific texts and that scientific texts as a whole are totally unrhetorical. It has been said that the Cours spawned a revolution in linguistic theory. This revolution, we are told, lay in the fact in that it authorized the study of languages in their static state, and not as part of a search for origins; it — to use the now familiar distinction it proposed — authorized the study of languages as synchronic objects rather than as part of diachronic inquiry. If, however, the Cours engendered a revolution in linguistic thought — as is often suggested in the disciplinary lore of both mainstream ‘scientific’ linguistics and contemporary poststructuralist theory, it cannot be said to have led to development of a system for describing human languages anywhere near as neat and robust as the mechanical system produced in the Newtonian revolution. The Cours, rather, proposed a series of what have proven to be captivating ideas and dichotomies — notions that, like the synchronic/diachronic distinction, have been used and abused by scholars of many different methodological commitments to undergird their lines of inquiry. In proposing that languages can be studied synchronically, the Cours suggested that there exists unavoidable systematicity to human languages in their states at any one time. Indeed, one of the most novel and captivating notions of the Cours may have been that at the core of human languages there exists a structured system. The captivating dichotomy that the Cours proposed to capture this notion is, of course, familiar; there exists a system of langue (an abstract formal system) that can be studied apart from Oenbring / 4 parole (language in use), with the primary goal of linguistics being the study of langue. The Cours is, however, deeply ambiguous as to whether this structured system is primarily psychological (= biological) or social in nature. Indeed, we see this tension clearly in the Cours’ very definition of the synchronic / diachronic dichotomy; the Cours suggests that synchronic linguistics “will be concerned with logical and psychological connexions between coexisting items constituting a system, as perceived by the same collective consciousness” (98). As we see in this quote, the Cours emphasizes that the systematicity of languages lies both in the potentials of human biology (“psychological connexions”) and the social groups in which the practices of language exist (the “collective consciousness”). Human languages are both sets of arbitrary social conventions and highly systematic sets of practices, highly constrained by human biology. Human languages, like all human cultural practices, exist in their current forms due to the interaction of the human genetic endowment with the vicissitudes of history. While most scholars of human language consider the idea that languages are both the products of human nature and individual culture banally true, determining where to draw the line between culture and biology has proven a remarkably tricky task. Indeed, whether to consider languages as primarily social facts (i.e., mostly cultural conventions) or constrained by human biology has led to a long, many-fronted battle among scholars espousing many different methodological commitments — a battle that is not a stretch to suggest has been a battle for the soul of the study of human languages. At the same time, this situation has engendered a climate of disciplinary isolation in both camps: the two sides view the Oenbring / 5 world so differently that they have difficulty in and little desire to communicate with one another. While we certainly can say scholars of human language have developed sound, basically scientific, knowledge about human languages in the areas of the study of language most directly connected to human physiology (e.g., phonology: the study of the system of sounds of human languages), developing a rigorous system to describe the workings of human languages in areas of study where culture plays a more significant role (e.g., semantics: the study of meaning; and syntax: the study of word order formations) has, however, proven a much trickier task. Linguists, like all scholars attempting to describe nature, attempt to describe the most possible phenomena with the fewest possible sets of rules. In particular, linguists have a special esteem for any set constraints, be they rules of grammar or rules of phonology, that can seemingly bring some sort of order to the chaos of human language. Accordingly, linguists, like other scholars interested in building scientific knowledge, attempt to limit the available set of problems they are attempting to tackle at any one moment. While languages are clearly both cultural and biological, various schools of thought have, over the past century, attempted to focus on one or the other for methodological purposes; they have attempted to factor out either the biological or the cultural aspect of language for the purposes of facilitating lines of inquiry. As I have suggested, we can, broadly stated, propose the existence of two general orientations toward the study of language in the past century: one that sees language as essentially a social fact (what I shall call the language as a social fact and/or the language as culture Oenbring / 6 school) and one that sees language as essentially a biological fact (what I shall call the language as a biological fact and/or the language as biology3 school). However, just as in many nature vs. nurture arguments, the various actors in the debate over to what degree languages are innate have overcommitted themselves to certain foundational propositions in order to legitimate their lines of research. Language as a Social Fact Inspired in varying degrees by the Cours, what has come to be called the structuralist tradition (including anthropologists on both sides of the Atlantic and what has come to be known as the American post-Bloomfieldian linguists) sought to develop rigorous models to describe the potentials of human language and culture largely without reference to human biology. Broadly stated, they attempted to develop frameworks to describe the potentials of human culture and language (i.e., to describe the systematicity of human languages and cultures) by reference to empirical evidence from human languages and cultures. In the anthropological structuralist tradition, this factoring out of biology can be understood largely as a response to racist and/or social Darwinist attitudes about non-Western cultures; these anthropologists attempted to highlight the richly systematic nature of non-Western cultures and languages. 4 That is to say, these scholars adopted a strongly culturally relativist stance in order to counter the common claim that marginalized groups are biologically inferior; these anthropologists construed nonWestern cultures as systematic in order to highlight that marginalized groups’ seeming 3 4 I have borrowed this phrasing from Joseph, Love, and Taylor (2001). For more see George and George’s The Structuralists: From Marx to Lévi-Strauss. Oenbring / 7 inability to perform within or adapt to Western cultures stems not from those groups biological inferiority, but rather from the richly systematic constraints of their own cultures. Although the ideas of the anthropological structuralist tradition and sociolinguistics have certainly had substantive effects on mainstream scientific linguistics, they have not throughout the past century been at the core of what has been deemed by the majority to constitute ‘scientific’ linguistics. To find a tradition of thought that factored out biology that at one time ruled ‘scientific’ inquiry into human languages is not, however, impossible. In the 1940s and 50s American linguistics was ruled by a tradition of thought that factored out issues of psychology and mind (and by extension biology) in the interests of making their models more scientific: namely, the postBloomfieldian tradition, a tradition also given the label American Structuralism. Inspired by the governing mood of logical positivism and behaviorism, the post-Bloomfieldians believed they could develop formal and abstract descriptions of human languages without appeal to concepts like structures in the mind or mental states — notions that were deemed highly speculative in that era.5 5 It should be noted, however, that the post-Bloomfieldians were, indeed, interested in developing rigorous models — models that might eventually describe the potentials of human nature — but deemphasized notions of biology and psychology in the interests of making their models more scientific. However, many of these scholars did not unreflectively assume that they were uncovering rigorous models to describe human nature. The mood was optimistic but careful: “let’s mine the depths using these models, test them off broad empirical evidence of language in use in many cultures, and see what happens.” That is to say, while the post-Bloomfieldians did believe their models to be the best models possible for linguistic inquiry, they were not willing to defend their models with the claim that they were uncovering structures in the mind. Oenbring / 8 These post-Bloomfieldian linguists were, furthermore, highly skeptical of searches for biological universals of language, as they associated such tendencies with the cultural chauvinism of missionary grammars of American Indian languages that assumed that all languages could be translated easily and freely into Latin. That is to say, the post-Bloomfieldian linguists adopted methodological and cultural relativism as a reaction against the linguocentrism of the colonial era. But the dominant tradition today that construes language as a social fact is a tradition that makes few moves toward construing their line of inquiry as scientific. This tradition, variously labeled as the postmodernist, poststructuralist, or social constructivist tradition, it is not a stretch to say, has swept up many areas of the humanities and social science in the past few decades. Broadly stated, the poststructuralist tradition differs from the structuralist tradition in its emphasis that cultural systems are not tied to human nature; while still emphasizing the systematicity of cultures, postmodernists run with the assumption that systems of cultural practice are themselves autonomous (i.e., that they exist outside of a limiting biology), constructed, and arbitrary. This work, often very political in focus, frequently attempts to explain the practices of language and culture at certain time and place by reference to dominant social formations, with the extant forms of culture being the product of the dominant social formations. That is to say, extant cultural practices (be they something as lofty as what has been canonized as ‘literature’ or as lowly as menus) can be read as evidence for a dominant social formation. By understanding culture itself as autonomous, postmodernist assumptions authorize the study of language without reference to underlying biology, and, furthermore, undergird Oenbring / 9 the study of language practices without ‘scientific’ methodological restrictions (e.g., setting up empirical experiments).6 That is to say, by construing language as an autonomous social practice, postmodernists can engage in inquiry merely by reading, interpreting, and accounting for the social formation undergirding language practices. Various postmodern masters have been enamored with one or more of the Cours’ captivating dichotomies (see, for example, the work of Derrida and Lacan). The dichotomy proposed by the Cours that postmodernist philosophers have found the most captivating is, of course, the Cours’ theory of the sign: that the relationship between the signifier (the sound image) and the signified (the concept) is totally arbitrary. Indeed, Saussure’s theory of the arbitrary nature of the sign has been one of the most influential and productive notions in postmodern philosophy. In particular, postmodern philosophers have been enamored with the proposition, seemingly encoded in the Cours’ theory of the sign, that culture itself is always already an arbitrary social construction, and that any attempts to uncover the ultimate ‘meaning’ or ‘reference’ of language and cultural patterns will ultimately lead to failure. Indeed, the postmodern philosophers that have expounded on the Cours’ theory of the sign have often taken on an unnecessarily skeptical stance, seemingly enjoying the fact that their propositions, if taken seriously, would seem to preclude the development of rich, scientific descriptions of the human language and culture. What’s more, the playful exuberance of much of this work 6 This is not, however, to suggest that postmodern theorists deny an underlying biology. Rather, as that we can have no privileged access as to what that underlying nature might be; all representations of nature are, ultimately, representations of nature. Oenbring / 10 (especially by figures such as Derrida and Lacan) routinely pushes the boundaries of what can and should be accepted as scholarship. The language as a social fact school is, however, a much more diverse school than I have just let on; most of its members are not as radical as these postmodern philosophers. Indeed, within the camp of language as a social fact can be found all the following groups: sociolinguists ( a group emphasizing the social systematicity of languages, tying specific practices of language to social variables [e.g., class, race, gender, and geography], countering broad assumption in the language as biology school of linguistics, namely the homogeneity of linguistics communities); discourse analysts (a broadly defined group of scholars that study language as it is actually used in real social situations); and rhetoricians (a group similarly interested in analyzing language in use, but often using a different interpretive vocabulary [namely, that of the rhetorical tradition], with many theorists placing emphasis on the agency of the individual). Language as a Biological Fact While the tradition of thought construing language as a social fact has, indeed, had significant effects upon inquiry into the study of language in the past century, it has not dominated ‘scientific’ inquiry into the study of human languages in most North American linguistics departments in the past four decades. Instead, North American linguistics has been dominated in much of the past half century by traditions of thought that emphasizes that language is, ultimately, a biological fact. By the notion of language as a biological fact I mean the following: extending the search for rich principles that are Oenbring / 11 ultimately the product of human biology (as have been found in the area of phonology) to include areas of language study that would at first appear to be largely cultural conventions (e.g., syntax and semantics). Indeed, the language as biology tradition believes that languages are too systematic to merely be the residue of the vicissitudes of history as seems to be the assumption of postmodernists. Rather, language as biology suggests that the systematicity of languages must ultimately be a product of constraints upon human languages that are themselves a product of the human genetic endowment.7 The most prominent theorist of this line of thought: Noam Chomsky and the various programs of generative grammar that he has promoted. However, these scholars of language that have claimed access to biology have claimed access to biology not by discovering actual genes or structures in the mind. Rather they have laid claim to language as biology through the gateway of mentalism: the claim that the analyses presented stand in for structures in the mind. The rhetorical allure of appeals to language as biology is clear, and such appeals have been a part of generative grammar since near its beginnings. Indeed, Lenneberg’s famous 1967 edited volume Biological Foundations of Language both gives prominent place to Chomsky’s work and promotes his person as a point of identity for the biological study of language. (This was at the same time that Chomsky was boldly proclaiming linguistics to be “a branch of cognitive psychology” [Language and Mind 130].) Despite the fact that after 7 Within in the language as biology tradition exist several contemporary and historically important schools of linguistic thought, including: some versions of what today is termed cognitive grammar and, of course, cognitive grammar’s more influential conceptual ancestor generative grammar — a tradition of thought that has played a very influential, even dominant, role in American linguistics in the past half century. Oenbring / 12 decades of work, generative grammar appears no closer than at its origin to bridging the gap between their descriptions of language and the genuine findings of psychologists and biologists, Chomsky has, in fact, ramped up his appeals to language as biology in recent work. For example, in his most recent publications, much of Chomsky’s emphasis is on the newly-promoted notion of biolinguistics (see, for example, Chomsky [2006]). Just as postmodern philosophers have seemingly taken an unnecessarily pessimistic stance toward our abilities to develop rigorous models to describe the potentials of human culture, the language as biology school, particularly scholars working in the field of generative grammar (the tradition of thought that this study is primarily about), have adopted a rhetorical position that seems to overstate what truly can be said to have been discovered by their research program. Despite the fact that their findings have always been, and remain, highly theoretical, generative grammarians have retained largely an uncompromisingly realist rhetoric. That is to say, despite the fact that their findings are highly theoretical, the generative grammarians maintain the commitment that what they are describing are, in fact, properties in the mind encoded by human biology.8 Interestingly, however, the language as biology tradition of thought, in much of its disciplinary lore, also traces its origin back to the Cours — the very same document 8 One should notice that both the language as biology and the language as a social fact schools have made rhetorical commitments to extreme positions — rhetorical commitments that undoubtedly have affected the institutional prestige of these various schools of thought. By suggesting that they are uncovering principles in the mind the language as biology school have been able to frame their work as the only properly scientific way to study human languages, and have therefore received the attendant disciplinary prestige warranted a scientific mode of inquiry. Conversely, it is not a stretch to suggest that the willing adoption of postmodern ideas by the contemporary humanities has only served to further its marginalization in the academy: “well if they don’t care about doing proper inquiry, then we shouldn’t care about them.” Oenbring / 13 that postmodern philosophers have worked from in developing systems of thought that would seem to preclude the attempt to develop rigorous scientific descriptions of human languages and cultures. Indeed, while the Cours ‘gave birth’ to modern scientific linguistics, it also engendered a school of thought that would seem to preclude the scientific study of language. (For more on the reception of the Cours in both traditions, see Roy Harris’ Saussure and his Interpreters.)9 Of course, those in the language as biology school trace a different genealogy for their methods; they secure the Cours’ position as a foundational document in ‘scientific’ linguistics by emphasizing its immediate effects on the development of biologicallyfocused theories of phonology in the early 20th century. The story goes something like this: early in the 20th century, the Cours inspired the phonological theories of the Prague school linguists, a group whose work was central in developing the scientific ambitions and biological orientation of much mainstream 20th century linguistics.10 These ideas were imported to America largely through the person of Roman Jakobson11 — a scholar who had fled Europe, settling in America in 1941 (Simpson 247) and who, through his While the language as biology school accept the Cours’ theory of the sign as uncontroversially true for its domain of original application (concepts and their corresponding sound images), the Cours’ theory of the sign has not, however, been widely productive in the language as biology school (see, for example, Seuren’s Western Linguistics: An Historical Introduction). That is to say, if languages are totally arbitrary sets of social practices in no way motivated by the human innate genetic endowment, then linguists’ descriptions, at least according to mainstream ‘scientific’ linguists, suddenly become non- or even anti-scientific. 10 See, for example, Sampson (1980). 11 Of course, Jakobson’s writings have had effects on several fields, including the structuralist tradition in anthropology and in literary criticism. 9 Oenbring / 14 positions at Harvard and MIT, promoted the search for biological universals as the ultimate goal of linguistic scholarship.12 But the major force for securing the place of the Cours’ formulations in linguistic theory has been, once again, Noam Chomsky — a scholar who, no doubt, received some of his own chutzpah to view language as biology from Jakobson and his students. Chomsky’s rhetorical masterstroke has been to reformulate a central dichotomy of the Cours, a maneuver that has served to undergird the program of generative grammar. In place of the dichotomy between langue and parole, Chomsky has proposed a distinction between competence and performance. Accordingly, Chomsky has marshaled the weight of tradition, and the authority of Saussure’s person in order to promote his own program as the most scientific way to study human language. While, as I have suggested, the notion of langue presented by the Cours is deeply ambiguous as to whether the systematicity of languages is either biological or cultural in nature, competence moves the formal system decidedly into the biological camp; unlike the system described by langue, competence cannot be construed as an abstract disembodied social system. Rather, competence describes the manifestation of that system in an individual’s ability to distinguish between well-formed and poorly-formed sentences — an ability that is construed ultimately as a product of the human genetic endowment. By factoring out performance (namely real evidence of how language is actually used day-to-day situations) and construing ‘scientific’ inquiry into human languages as something that lays bare the features of competence, generative What’s more, Jakobson served at Harvard as the mentor of Morris Halle, an important player in development of generative grammar (see, for example, Harris [1994b]). 12 Oenbring / 15 grammarians have been able to position their work as laying bare the features of the mind while producing formal models that are even more abstract than the disembodied formal systems posited by some scholars in the language as culture tradition. That is to say, by adopting a mentalist rhetoric generative grammarians have been able to position their school of thought as more scientific than scholars proposing purely disembodied systems even though the amount to which the models proposed in the various schools stand up to broad empirical testing may be comparable.13 Master Texts, the Author Function, and Disciplinary Identity Not everything in master texts needs to be accepted as true by later scholars for the tradition of thought spawned by it to see the text as a master text. Certainly Darwin’s Origin includes “speculative knowledge” (Gross 5) that is not considered science by contemporary biologists. Rather, for a text to be promoted as a master text by later scholars in the field it must promote propositions that come be seen as foundational to the discipline; it must promote ideas that come to be part of the central disciplinary identity 13 The important point to take away here is this: that even in areas of study of human languages that have taken the institutional role of ‘scientific’ linguistics, the assumptions undergirding methods have played a central role in those lines of inquiry. While assumptions play an important role in all lines of inquiry, even scientific ones, in many strands of linguistics, assumptions in and of themselves can be said to constitute the lines of inquiry in a substantive way. The ultimate reason for primacy of assumptions in linguistics, even in ‘scientific’ linguistics, lies in the fact that the models used by these linguists are themselves formal and abstract. Indeed, as many logicians and philosophers have noted, formal, axiomatic systems are always already underdetermined by empirical evidence. However, many scholars in the language as biology school would make the claim that the problematic assumptions that they make are necessary assumptions if we are to prevent inquiry into human languages from dissolving into mysteries. This is cannot be the case. While making bold assumptions may facilitate the lines of inquiry (as it has for both postmodernists and generative grammarians), formalism and theorybuilding should never take precedence over broad empirical adequacy if what one is genuinely interested in is real scientific inquiry. Oenbring / 16 of the field. That is to say, for a text to have broad and deep influence — and for its author to be canonized as a master — its effects on disciplinary identity (i.e., its effects on how the discipline understands itself and its unique contributions to human knowledge) are seemingly more important than its actual effects upon the real methods of scholars. Deference to the ideas of the masters is, indeed, a common feature of both ‘scientific’ linguistics and contemporary poststructuralist readings of culture. That is to say, even though the Cours should not be read as an authored text, the person of Saussure, the idea of Saussure as author, has undergirded scholarship in both scientific linguistics and poststructuralist theory; the Cours, although unauthored, is (to demonstrate deference to my favorite postmodern master, a scholar whose body of work was, ironically, devoted largely to doing away with the cult of the individual) imbued with what Foucault has called an author function (1969 [1986]); the idea of Saussure as author/agent serves to legitimate inquiry. This deference to author/agents is, however, I hope to show, a common theme in contemporary ‘scientific’ linguistics. In doing as such, furthermore, I hope to put to rest the concerns expressed in the first two paragraphs of this study. As the example of the Cours shows us, simple yet alluring dichotomies can serve as the lynchpins of disciplinary identity of intellectual communities. What’s more, the same text can serve as lynchpin of multiple intellectual communities if its propositions Oenbring / 17 are alluring and vague enough.14 The setup of the Cours’ dichotomies — i.e., the rhetoric of the Cours’ salient formulations — have clearly inspired later work, some of it understood by its practitioners and by others as scientific. Indeed, the Cour is a clear case in which ‘scientific’ theorizing has been produced and constrained by specific rhetorical formulations. The constraining effects of rhetoric upon strands of inquiry understood as scientific has, I hope to show, been common in the history of contemporary North American linguistics. Noam Chomsky: A Living Author This is a study, primarily, about the rhetorical strategies of the founding father of generative grammar and one of the central figures in the language as biology tradition, Noam Chomsky, that other giant of linguistics of the 20th century. Over the course of his academic career — a career that now stretches more than half a century, Chomksy has, a la Saussure, proposed several ideas and dichotomies that have proven captivating to ‘scientific’ linguists, ideas that have undergirded much later inquiry. However, he, unlike Saussure, has participated actively in debates regarding how to develop proper scientific lines of inquiry for linguistics; he has argued consistently and vigorously in support of his beliefs, attempting to demarcate15 generative grammar as the most properly scientific approach for studying human languages. What’s more, Chomksy has articulated clear 14 As I have shown, the Cours did not inscribe boundaries for scientific inquiry into human languages. Rather, its captivating dichotomies opened up a remarkably wide field of play for inquiry into human language. 15 I have borrowed the notion of ‘rhetorical demarcation’ from Charles Alan Taylor’s Defining Science: A Rhetoric of Demarcation. Oenbring / 18 and distinct boundaries between what he believes should be considered proper scientific linguistics and what should not. In engaging in these moves, Chomsky has, it is not a stretch to suggest, lorded over the field of generative grammar; the models of generative grammarians have used at various points in the history of generative grammar have been, to varying to degrees, those which Chomsky himself has authorized. It has not, in fact, always been case that scholarship in the field of generative grammar has been held together by assumptions authorized by Chomsky. In the years following the publication of his seminal 1965 book Aspects of the Theory of Syntax Chomsky engaged in a vitriolic debate with a movement, generative semantics, that for a while looked as if it would take control of the institutional reins of the study of generative syntax. Broadly stated, generative semanticists took one of the captivating dichotomies proposed by Aspects, namely the distinction between surface structure (related to sound) and deep structure (related to meaning), and ran with it. The mood of the time, supported by Chomsky’s work with Halle in their now infamous tome that inspired the field of generative phonology, The Sound Pattern of English (1966), was that any all surface features of language can be decomposed into a small set of universal primitives and that inquiry into languages should posit the existence abstract, formal, elaborate (and, oftentimes, highly dubious) transformations from these deep structures to surface structures. Following in this mood, generative semanticists pushed the notion of deep structure articulated by Chomksy as far as they could. Some generative semanticists claimed, for example, that sentences that mean the same thing, but use different phrasing to express that same thing should, ultimately, have Oenbring / 19 the same underlying representation. What’s more, many generative semanticists openly embraced the notion of abstract syntax: the notion that these underlying primitives can be unified with formal logic.16 That is to say, these generative semanticists seemed to take their system outside the realm of language as biology, and into the realm of abstract ideas. (Nonetheless, many generative semanticists still based their central theoretical notions such as derivational and transderivational constraints on appeals to an underlying limiting biology.) Chomsky, however, was never convinced by the generative semanticists, maintaining the claim that semantics in the realm of syntax should be interpretive rather than generative — meaning that the number of possible deep structure formations should be limited and there should not be an unconstrained search for a unified deep layer of meaning. Indeed, Chomsky quickly attempted to put the brakes on the unconstrained search for deep structures (see, for example, Chomsky’s defining work of this period “Remarks on Nominalization” [1970] where he suggests that nominalized verbs [e.g., ‘destruction’] should not be decomposed into their ‘original’ verbs [e.g., ‘destruct’]). In engaging in these moves — namely reformulating and articulating boundaries for the deep structure / surface structure distinction (a distinction that he has tinkered with several times over the history of generative grammar), Chomksy has, wittingly or unwittingly, circumscribed boundaries for generative research more or less associated with his own person. 16 See, for example, McCawley (1970) and Lakoff (1970), (1972). Oenbring / 20 Generative Grammar: A Captivating Idea Early in the 20th century, North American scholars of language, working largely in the anthropological tradition, encountered the incredible diversity and complexity of Native American languages. These languages seemed totally unresponsive to description using the traditional grammatical categories that Western scholars of language have used since antiquity. In this climate, Benjamin Whorf proposed his linguistic relativity hypothesis: namely, the claim that the available grammatical categories of a language inscribe a worldview.17 Confronting the realization that languages are remarkably different led the post-Bloomfieldian linguist Martin Joos to proclaim his now famous assertion — an assertion much maligned by Chomskyans18 — that “languages could differ from each other without limit and in unpredictable ways” (Joos 96). Although the post-Bloomfieldian mainstream, which Whorf was not a part of, did, in fact, believe their methods to be the most properly scientific approach the study of human languages, the specters of relativism and skepticism were, indeed, on the horizon. In opposition to this climate, generative grammar proposed methods that appeared to offer hope that linguists could develop rigorous scientific descriptions of syntax and semantics. Rather than being overwhelmed by the possibilities of human languages, Chomsky instead saw clear and distinct mathematically-elegant patterns at the core of human languages; he treated the human mind as something that operates like a computer, working through formal subroutines (this concept is most clear in The Logical Structure While in the popular understanding of Whorf’s ideas the focus largely is on lexical items (e.g., Eskimo words for snow), Whorf’s work with the linguistic relativity hypothesis is largely focused on grammatical categories and patterns (see, for example, Language, Thought and Reality). 18 See, for example, Newmeyer (2005: ix). 17 Oenbring / 21 of Linguistic Theory). Indeed, much of the appeal of generative grammar — something that has existed in the model since its beginnings — is the notion that there exists a formal, structural, and mathematically-elegant unity to syntactic constructions. Since the 1960s Chomsky has worked to legitimate the program of generative grammar by the suggesting that his methods can work to lay bare syntactic constructions that are innate to the human mind; Chomsky has reinforced his claims that generative grammar reveals robust patterns that govern human languages by including a mentalist rhetoric. Languages are, therefore, to generative grammarians, not just social constructions or the residue of language change, but are rather objects constrained by the potentials of our innate human nature. In order to find deep formal unities in human language that are ultimately the product of the human mind Chomsky has worked from some problematic methodological assumptions. First of all, as aforementioned, generative grammar makes the explicit assumption that proper inquiry into human languages should lay bare the features of competence rather than considering evidence from performance (see, for example, 1965’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax).19 That is to say, Chomsky claims that the goal of linguistic inquiry should be to develop theories about the syntactic structures of human language based on native speakers’ intuitions of well-formedness (basically the grammaticality) of certain constructions rather than language as it is actually used in real social situations. Secondly, generative grammar as a whole proceeds from deduction rather than induction. Deductive inquiry proceeds by the assumption of the well19 This distinction has, more recently, been recast as e-language and i-language (see, for example, Chomsky’s Knowledge of Language). Oenbring / 22 formedness of first principles, applying the general principle to specific cases encountered further on in inquiry; it is top-down. Conversely, inductive inquiry, a mode of inquiry generally thought to be more scientific, looks for broad evidence and attempts to build rules from that broad evidence; it is bottom-up. This willingness to work by deduction is something that has existed in the generative tradition since its beginning. Indeed, in his first important work, 1957’s Syntactic Structures, Chomsky made bold statements for the research program of generative grammar based on evidence as meager as the phenomenon of affix hopping in English. Thirdly, and related, generative grammarians have willingly made bold proclamations about the potentials of all human languages based on evidence largely from Western languages, with English being by far the most common source of evidence. Following Chomsky’s lead, generative grammarians argue that our ability to distinguish between novel well-formed sentences and poorly-formed sentences indicates that there must exist principles of well-formedness for syntactic constructions that are innate in the human mind. We must, according to Chomsky, recognize that there exist principles of well-formedness because languages are essentially creative; we can recognize the grammatically or ungrammatically of sentences or constructions that we have never heard before. In order to access and develop theories about these principles of well-formedness one of the common methods used by generative grammarians is to compare native speakers’ (usually in practice this means the linguist themselves) intuitions of wellformedness of similar — and oftentimes rare and unusual — syntactic constructions. The Oenbring / 23 following example from Chomsky’s 1981 book Lectures on Government and Binding demonstrates these methods nicely. Chomsky, for example, suggests that there is a clear difference between the well-formedness of the following sentences, claiming that the first sentence is well-formed and the last sentence is poorly-formed (indicated by the asterisk): (20) (i) they thought that I said that feeding each other would be difficult (ii) * they seemed that I said that feeding each other would be difficult20 (Chomsky 78) What is interesting about Chomsky’s treatment of these sentences is not that he recognizes a difference between the well-formedness of these two sentences. Indeed, my intuitions of well-formedness suggest that the latter is poorly formed. Rather, what is interesting is that Chomsky construes the poorly-formed nature of the second sentence as something more than the fact that it just doesn’t make sense or as something more than a banal cultural pattern. Instead, Chomsky uses this distinction as evidence for theoretical constructs (in this case, the patterning of antecedent control for PRO and trace) that he intimates exist in all human languages.21 The above example nicely illustrates a concept that, for many generative grammarians, has come to be the sine qua non of their field: the autonomy of syntax. 20 I have simplified the visual representation of this sentence for the purpose of reducing my explanatory burden at this point. 21 What’s more, it is interesting that generative grammarians rely upon such odd examples for purposes of making distinctions. Generative grammarians claim that these unique and syntactically intricate examples are an asset; as we are unlikely to have heard such intricate examples or hear them rarely, and still have intuitions well-formedness vs. poor-formedness indicates that these distinctions cannot have been learned through explicit teaching or our enculturation. Conversely, critics of generative grammar suggest that these odd examples are chosen selectively because they appear to be the best examples for supporting the theoretical constructs being supported: they claim that generativists cherry pick their examples. Oenbring / 24 Broadly stated, autonomous syntax means this: that patterns of word-ordering are not just patterns of cultural habit, nor are they constrained by pragmatic features (the social codes of language), nor by discourse features (i.e., the patterning of information in speech or texts above the sentence level) or constraints imposed by the mind’s conceptual processing of sentences. Rather, generative grammarians suggest that there exist formal, logical, rules that govern well-formedness of all syntactic constructions (in practice this usually means individual sentences) that are themselves autonomous, constrained by none of these external features. It is, for example, tempting to suggest that the differences between the wellformedness of the two sentences above lies in the differences in patterns of usage or in the meanings of the words thought and seemed (i.e., that ‘they seemed that I said’ just isn’t something we commonly say or just doesn’t make a lot of sense when describing the held beliefs of groups in response to reported speech). This suggestion, the suggestion that it is something about the meaning of the verb to seem itself and our patterns usage of the verb to seem that prevents us accepting the well-formedness of the whole syntactic construction they seemed that I said would, in fact, be the position taken by many scholars in a prominent current school of thought in the study of syntax: construction grammar. Generative grammar, however, does not foreground the meaning and usage patterns of individual lexical items. Rather, the dogma of autonomous syntax states that the well-formedness of sentences can and should be gauged by description using formal rules that apply to elements in hierarchical syntactic trees across the boundaries of clauses (so in this case the sentence as a whole). Oenbring / 25 Indeed, in Chomsky’s description, the problem with the second sentence (They seemed that I said that feeding each other would be difficult) is that the theoretical construct of trace, something that he suggests exists in this sentence in the slot just before the present participle ‘feeding’ in the third clause of the sentence, cannot be governed remotely by its antecedent ‘they’ (which has moved from current spot of the trace, leaving the trace, to the beginning of the sentence in search of case). That is to say, Chomsky construes the problem with the second sentence by reference to issues with the government of trace, with trace being an item that exists outside of the questionable bit of syntax itself (they seemed that I said). Chomsky’s explanation demonstrates clearly the assumptions of the doctrine of autonomous syntax; the explanations given are theoryinternal and focus on the constraints imposed by constructs supposed to exist across hierarchical syntactic trees rather than stemming from issues of usage or meaning. Science Studies and the Rhetoric of Science Inspired in varying degrees by cultural theorists inspired in varying degrees by the Cours (e.g., Foucault), the broad science studies movement, including scholars from across the humanities and social sciences, has in recent decades sought to develop rich descriptions of scientific knowledge as a social fact; science studies scholars have sought to investigate how the cultural practices of science, including its practices of language, constrain and produce its practices and regimes of knowledge. Under the broad science studies tent are a number of groups of scholars, including: philosophers of science, a faction, broadly stated, who seek to articulate clear criteria for distinguishing ‘science’ Oenbring / 26 from ‘non-science’; sociologists of science, a group that, not surprisingly, investigates the macro- and micro-sociological elements of scientific knowledge; discourse analysts, scholars that study how language is used in particular situations; and rhetoricians of science, scholars who study how scientists or would-be scientists use language in the achievement of particular ends. This study is, as I have noted, ultimately, an addition to the tradition of rhetoric of science.22 Broadly stated, rhetoricians of science differ from these other groups under the science studies tent in their focus on how individuals achieve ends using language. Rhetoricians of science differ from these other ‘pure postmodernists’ — those that wish to dissolve all notions of individuality into dominant social systems and legitimated cultural practices — in their interest in accounting for the ability of speakers to use language strategically in order to achieve particular ends; rhetoricians highlight the agency of speakers.23 Interestingly enough, the seeming obsession that rhetoricians of science have with reading from the perspective of agency has been the crux of the most thorough and prominent critique of the movement, specifically, Gaonkar’s famous essay “The Idea of 22 Like many texts promoting the notion of rhetoric of science, this study includes in its introductory chapter an explanation for this somewhat offensive combination of terms. Indeed, I would like to state now that I do not advocate the strongly relativist position espoused by the more radical wing of science studies; I do not avow the position (a position taken by only a small minority of the field of science studies) that scientific knowledge is itself an illusion (or a collective delusion). Rather, this text is a case study of the argumentation and rhetorical positioning of a particular dominant school of thought within the field of linguistics – a school of thought, that despite the highly theoretical nature of its findings has, nevertheless, been able to position itself as the most properly scientific way to study human languages throughout much of the past half century. 23 Unfortunately, not all studies that have worked under the heading of rhetoric of science have included this emphasis on agency; my schema is not perfect, but I believe it is valuable. Those that do not highlight agency I would place under the title discourse studies of science. Oenbring / 27 Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science.” In the piece, Gaonkar charges rhetoricians of science, and rhetorical critics as a whole with appropriating the concepts of a tradition of thought aimed at the production of persuasive speech for the purposes of interpreting texts. That is to say, the very notion of rhetoric is deeply entwined with an ideology of language production focused on the agency of the speaker. What’s more, Gaonkar argues that a rhetorical reading of scientific texts inevitably moves toward the seductive trap of romantic hermeneutics: a reading of history focused to an inappropriate degree on the agency of individuals. While one might view rhetorical criticism’s emphasis on agency as a point of concern or an unavoidable methodological assumption that we can quietly sweep under the rug, I would like to argue that rhetoricians of science should openly embrace our concern with, our love of, agency. Indeed, a largely unrecognized theme in much rhetoric of science scholarship up to now has been the focus on ‘revolutionary’ scientists: scholars that have unquestionably changed their disciplines in profound ways. Certainly there have been scientists who have been able to transcend the ideological matrix of their disciplines and promote unique and valuable theorizing that has had legitimate effects upon the state of knowledge in their field. Such scholars, labeled variously as instigators of “scientific revolutions” (Kuhn) or “initiators of discursive practices” (Foucault [1969 (1986)]) can have the effect of reorganizing the entire methodological systems of their disciplines. As I have suggested, mainstream philosophy of science has traditionally attempted to articulate universalized criteria for the demarcation of science from non- Oenbring / 28 science; it has attempted to articulate demarcation criteria that exist for all science all the time. That is to say, mainstream philosophy of science has not paid sufficient attention to how scientists adjudicate and promote theories in the real contexts of knowledge making. Ethnographic accounts of laboratory work such as those produced by sociologists of science, have attempted to address many of these issues, but have largely focused on the contexts where the banal work of what Kuhn calls ‘normal science’ rules. These ethnographic studies, although intriguing, have offered little to further our knowledge of how genuinely revolutionary scientists have been able to reconstitute the knowledgeapparatus of their field. Here, I argue, is where rhetoric of science has something to offer the broader field of science studies. Indeed, there has been a distinct tendency in much scholarship in rhetoric of science to focus on the textual formations of scientists that have had truly profound impacts on the disciplinary imagination of both their fields and science as a whole: Campbell (1986) focuses on Darwin; Fahnestock (1999) touches on Darwin as well; Gross (1990) analyzes the work of Copernicus and Newton among others; Ceccarelli (2001) centers much of her book around the textual formations of Dobzhansky, a central figure in the modern synthesis in biology; and, finally, Bazerman (1988) spends time directly analyzing Watson and Crick’s famous piece in Nature wherein they staked their claim to ownership of the double helix model for DNA. This focus on ‘revolutionary’ scientist/rhetors by many scholars in rhetoric of science suggests that the rhetorical textual formulations that lead to radical reformulations of disciplinary knowledge are indeed a particularly valuable site of research for rhetorical critics. Oenbring / 29 Like or dislike his claims and methods, Chomsky should be viewed as one of these transcendent figures. Or at least, transcendent figure is the role he has played (and played well) within the discipline of linguistics; like it or not, we must admit that Chomsky’s near- stranglehold on the disciplinary identity of linguistics in the U.S. is a legitimate social fact. Indeed, even linguists whose projects display no deference to Chomsky’s work often define their projects against Chomsky. What’s more, Chomsky’s ability to play this role as a central element of the disciplinary identity of linguistics has, for certain, been at least in part a product of his own rhetorical agency. Rhetoric of Science and Rhetorical Criticism It may be true that using the terminology of rhetoric to describe the argumentative dynamics of a public or academic debate may never be able to get beyond a description hyper-focused on the individual agency of the speaker. If, however, there has ever been an academic field afforded high scientific prestige in many areas of the academy where romantic hermeneutics offers an appropriate reading of that field’s history, then generative grammar is that field. It is, indeed, difficult to overstate Chomsky’s influence, both in terms of the day-to-day methods of generative grammarians over the past half century and as a founding father in the disciplinary lore of generative grammar. As Chomsky’s works have had such huge effects upon the field of generative grammar, this suggests that rhetorical analysis of his major texts — and how those texts worked to frame and promote generative grammar at their particular moments of publication — allows access to substantive methodological issues behind the project of Oenbring / 30 generative grammar. Accordingly, I focus my rhetorical analysis in this study on Chomsky’s major publications. While I do look at the arguments forwarded by other central generative grammarians and do look into the reception of certain work, in this study the texts that I analyze are, largely, Chomsky’s most famous texts. While I recognize that this focus may make my analysis appear as a run through the greatest hits, I would like to make it clear that I have chosen this focus for more nuanced reasons than the fact that they are famous. I have chosen the texts that I have because of their substantive effects upon the methodological apparatus and discipline of generative grammar. Indeed, as the goal of this study is, in part, to understand the disciplinary functioning of generative grammar, a focus on the canonical texts of that that disciplinary matrix is understandable. Many rhetorical critics, including rhetoricians of science, often feel the need to frame the concepts presented in the text as renewing the traditions of the ancient Greek and Roman classical rhetoricians (this tendency is especially prominent in works like Alan Gross’ The Rhetoric of Science, Prelli’s A Rhetoric of Science, and Fahnestock’s Rhetorical Figures in Science). While I routinely invoke notions from the classical rhetorical tradition like ethos, in this study I largely avoid displays of deference to the classical rhetorical tradition. Instead, I envision this study as part of a newer tradition of scholarship that accepts that rhetoric of science as having achieved enough autonomy as a field in order to stand alone, without the authority of the classical tradition to support it. For example, one of the major theoretical innovations of Ceccarelli’s Shaping Science with Rhetoric is the notion of a conceptual chiasmus: the idea that rhetors successful in Oenbring / 31 bridging disciplinary divides are those who are able to cause distinct intellectual communities to see the world through each others’ eyes. Although the term conceptual chiasmus includes a nod of deference to the classical rhetorical figure chiasmus, the notion of conceptual chiasmus, like much of the rest of Ceccarelli’s book, while clearly rhetorical in spirit, is not directly beholden to the classical rhetorical tradition in any substantive way. As I have already intimated, two of the defining notions of this study are the concepts of disciplinary identity, and its corresponding idea of identity work. The notion of identity work is, I would argue, the flipside of the notion of boundary work, a concept promoted by sociologists of science such as Gieryn (1999) and rhetoricians of science such as Charles Alan Taylor (1996). While boundary work generally describes how established hard sciences such as biology and physics patrol their boundaries in order to exclude non-sciences such as non-Western medicine and cold fusion from the canons of scientific knowledge, identity work, I argue, describes how softer or more theoretical disciplines or strands of inquiry frame their projects as the most properly scientific way to study a certain object. While the notion of disciplinary identity is by no means a neologism, and has seen some attention among rhetorical critics (see, for example, Mailloux’s 2006 book Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and Composition), the notion of disciplinary identity has not been a primary concern of work in the rhetoric of science tradition until now. Indeed, the notion of identity work should apply equally well to rhetors within softer sciences such as linguistics as it should to highly theoretical elements of harder sciences like the branch of physics known as string Oenbring / 32 theory. Increasing focus on how certain scholars rhetorically manage disciplinary identity will, I hope, be this study’s most important addition the rhetoric of science tradition and rhetorical criticism as a whole. The History of the Present Chapters two and three provide an overview of the rhetorical maneuvers Chomsky has engaged in over his academic career in order to foment his serial revolutions in the disciplinary identity of generative grammar and linguistics, tracing Chomsky’s rhetorical development from his earliest publications until the Principles and Parameters framework of the 1980s. In chapter two, I start by outlining the major trends in the history of North American linguistics in the first half of the twentieth century, laying out the major features of the thought of important linguists such as Bloomfield and Zellig Harris. If, indeed, I am to demonstrate the boldness and novelty of Chomsky’s propositions, especially in regard to the notion of autonomous syntax, I will need to present the ideas and work of earlier 20th century linguists so that they can be compared with Chomsky’s methods. This is also important if I am to avoid the maneuver of Chomsky and his followers making straw men the post-Bloomfieldians. Later in chapter two I work through Chomsky’s earliest publications up until the early sixties, including his famous 1957 book Syntactic Structures — a text that in many accounts of the history of generative grammar is treated as the text that caused the broader Chomskyan revolution. Oenbring / 33 Chapter three covers the history of generative grammar from 1965’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax until relatively recently, avoiding extensive attention to the Minimalist Program, as it is treated separately in chapter seven. In chapter three, I work from the Aspects, up through the Extended Standard Theory, up to the Government and Binding/Principles and Parameters approach. For my rhetorical analysis I focus primarily on Chomsky’s major works like Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (1972) and Lectures on Government and Binding (1981). Speaking of the ascent of the generative approach as a revolution is, of course, to offer a somewhat romanticized portrait of the institutional ascent of generative grammar. What’s more, it is important to keep in mind that Chomksy has also, due to his activism, been a huge figure on the American radical left, a revolutionary symbol, a place that no doubt has helped him position himself as a prophet in the wilderness in his scholarship on language. Accordingly, the fourth chapter analyzes a handful of ways that Chomsky has worked to build his revolutionary ethos, paying special attention to how Chomsky has told the history of generative grammar and the inevitable role that Chomsky’s political work has played in solidifying the idea of Chomsky as a ‘revolutionary’ scientist. Another major topic of chapter four is how Chomsky and his followers have told the history of generative grammar; I analyze Chomsky and his followers’ revolutionary historiography. While Chomsky is quite charismatic in his public lectures on both linguistics and politics, many of his most important linguistic texts are very unwelcoming to readers not familiar with the technical methodological minutiae of generative grammar at the Oenbring / 34 moment of the texts’ publications. Despite their technicality, many of Chomsky’s most technical texts are also some of his most famous and most cited (e.g., Aspects, Sound Pattern of English, and Lectures on Government and Binding).24 Recognizing that some of Chomsky’s most influential texts have also been some of his most technical does not, however, require a retreat to the traditionalist position: that rhetoric has little to no effect on scholarly discourse. Close attention to the Chomsky’s entire body of work suggests that he has, in fact, been quite adept at reframing his arguments and his style for different audiences; Chomsky has several genres available in his repertoire. Indeed, as early his 1966 and 1968 publications Cartesian Linguistics and Language and Mind, we see Chomsky producing texts arguably designed more to secure the place of his linguistic theories among a broader academic audience than to influence syntactic theory. This line of popularly-focused argumentation I shall call Chomsky’s historical/philosophical genre — a line of Chomsky’s scholarship that uses quite different rhetorical and argumentative appeals than his technical scholarship. Following along these lines, chapters five and six look at the question of audience, and how Chomsky has promoted his ideas by fashioning his arguments in a manner that accords with the needs of his various audiences. In these chapters I investigate the specific rhetorical and stylistic features of the different forms of writing in which the scholarship of generative grammar is manifested, paying specific attention to 24 This fact would, at first, seem to directly contradict a commonly made claim by rhetoricians of science: that we can account for a text’s success (or lack thereof) by examining its style and/or its packaging (see, for example, McCloskey’s The Rhetoric of Economics and/or Gross’ The Rhetoric of Science). That is to say, if Chomsky’s most successful texts are also some of his most inaccessible, then it would appear that what other scholars appreciated about the texts were the texts’ ideas and propositions - not the author’s style. Oenbring / 35 each of the following styles of text: the research article in generative grammar (something that Chomsky himself has produced few if any of); the linguistics textbook, with special attention to the place that Chomsky and his project have played in linguistics textbooks over time; and the differences between Chomsky’s writing aimed at a general academic audience and his writing aimed at specialists in the field of generative grammar. The former two are the primary object of chapter five. Chapter six overviews the rhetorical features of Chomsky’s texts aimed at general academic audiences and traces a specific change in Chomsky’s argumentation in what I have called his historical/philosophical genre. Chomsky’s philosophical/historical texts are, indeed, remarkable rhetorical artifacts. In these texts Chomsky directly positions his linguistic ideas in relation to broad historical trends in scholarship and philosophy (he has, for example, explicitly connected his ideas with the rationalist and dualist tradition in philosophy). In chapter six, I also analyze a recent shift in Chomsky’s historical/philosophical reasoning; Chomsky has, in the past ten years, gone from connecting his view of the mind with dualist philosophers to arguing actively against the dualist view of the mind-body problem. This move, I argue, has been done in order to attempt to articulate yet another revolutionary vision for the program of generative grammar. The final chapter, chapter seven, serves as a conclusion for my history of generative grammar and the study itself. Most of the chapter focuses on Chomsky’s argumentation under what he has called the Minimalist Program (see, for example, Chomsky [1995]). Finishing with the Minimalist Program is appropriate not only Oenbring / 36 because it is the most recent officially sanctioned version of generative grammar, but also because Chomsky’s argumentation has become more ambiguously realist under MP; he has become more likely to suggest that the generative approach may not be uncovering unambiguous properties of the human mind (see, for example, his hedging in The Architecture of Language). Furthermore, MP has been more controversial among syntacticians — even among traditional supporters of generative grammar — than Chomsky’s previous programs. That is to say, the revolution may be finally withering. Nevertheless, MP takes one of the boldest assumptions of generative grammar — namely the well-formed nature of natural languages — and pushes it to its logical conclusion. Indeed, despite the fact that Chomsky may have lost a substantial portion of his flock, Chomsky remains, characteristically, as bold as ever. Oenbring / 37 Chapter 2: Creating the Research Space of Generative Grammar: From Bloomfield to Syntactic Structures Much of [Chomsky’s] work … has been more impressive for its rhetoric of claim and counter claim than for the light it has thrown on language. Moore and Carling, 1982 Introduction The story of the so-called ‘Chomskyan Revolution’ — what Matthews roguishly refers to as “1957 and All That” (Matthews [1993: 1]) — has been told many times, by many commentators. These descriptions range from near hagiography (Lyons [1970]; Newmeyer25 [1980 (1986)] and [1986]; Anderson [1985]; and Barsky [1997] and [2007]) to more critical accounts (Sampson [1980]; Matthews [1993]; Harris [1993]; Harlow [1995]; Tomalin [2006]) to attempts to debunk (Murray [1980] and [1993]). While the story of the Chomskyan revolution has seen much scholarly attention — attention that Chomsky’s critics no doubt see as unwarranted (and only serving to reinscribe a folk narrative serving Chomsky) — this study would not be complete without substantive analysis of how Chomsky and his followers rhetorically fomented what must be acknowledged to be a coup in the disciplinary identity of linguistics in the fifties and sixties. This story, the story of the Chomskyan revolution 25 I should disclose that even though I critique Newmeyer, I owe a seminar that I took from him for giving me my first serious introduction to the field of the history of linguistics. I shall be always grateful for the help he has offered me. Oenbring / 38 — along with the stories of Chomsky’s subsequent (at least rhetorical) revolutions in the study of generative grammar that he has attempted to foment over the past few decades — is the story presented in the coming pages. One should remember, however, that my goal in this chapter — as with this study as a whole — is neither hagiography, nor is it to directly debunk Chomsky’s theories. Rather, the goal is to attempt to account for Chomksy’s remarkable continual success as a rhetor — both in his ability to spread his theories and in his ability to position himself as the arbiter of disciplinary methods and goals (i.e., his positioning himself as author). Of course, I believe that my account of the Chomsky’s revolutions has several things to offer that other versions of the story don’t. As ardent generative grammarians, the stories that Newmeyer and Lyons each tell attribute Chomsky’s success to the usefulness and correctness of his ways of modeling human language; they believe that generative grammar won because it is correct and/or uniquely valuable. What’s more, they often follow Chomsky’s accounts of the history of linguistics to the letter. Murray (1980) and (1993), a sociologist, and Huck and Goldsmith (1995) prefer instead to connect Chomsky’s success with his institutional triumph; Chomsky, according to these scholars, succeeded in securing and maintaining the dominance of the approaches he favored because his version of generative grammar and its successors were quickly established as the guiding paradigm in several institutions with both graduate programs and sufficient funding.26 While institutional sanctioning no doubt has played an important role in the continued dominance of generative grammar, to suggest that 26 Huck and Goldsmith connect the failure of generative semantics not with intrinsic problems with its models, but rather with its promoters’ inability to achieve institutional critical mass. Oenbring / 39 generative grammar succeeded merely because of its institutional support neglects to account for how Chomsky has profoundly altered the disciplinary imagination and identity of linguistics. Indeed, even scholars that challenge or display no deference to Chomsky’s work have had to define — and have had their project defined — in relation to generative grammar. As Sampson notes, “those scholars who acknowledge no … obligation [to Chomsky] are seen (and see themselves) as ‘anti-Chomskyans’ as much as proponents of their own views” (Sampson 130). As a whole, histories of generative grammar have neglected more recent developments; historians of generative grammar have focused largely on the period between 1957’s Syntactic Structures27 and 1970’s “Remarks on Nominalization,” the time of the advent of generative grammar until the time of Chomsky’s most important rejoinder to his debates with the generative semantics movement.28 The focus on time period is understandable. In this time period Chomsky and his followers dramatically reframed the underlying goals and identity of mainstream ‘scientific’ linguistics. Moreover, through his rhetorical work in the generative semantics debates, Chomsky positioned himself as generative grammar’s one and only final prophet; he positioned himself as the ultimate arbiter of the boundaries of generative methodology — A notable exception to the contrary is Tomalin’s recent (2006) book Linguistics and the Formal Sciences which draws connections between Chomsky’s early work and contemporary work in formal logic. 28 As the generative semantics movement has been a major focus of several studies on the history of generative grammar (i.e., Newmeyer [1980 (1986)], Harris [1993], Huck and Goldsmith [1995], Seuren [1998: 502-527]), I avoid extensive analysis of this period. 27 Oenbring / 40 boundaries that, at times, seem more motivated by prophetic inspiration than empirical reality.29 This limitation of time period is particularly clear in the only scholarship in the rhetoric of science tradition directly analyzing Chomsky’s rhetoric: Randy Allen Harris’ four 1989-1994 publications on the history of generative grammar — the most substantial of which is his 1993 book The Linguistics Wars.30 Of Harris’ four publications on the history of generative grammar, however, only in his 1989 article “Argumentation in Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures” does Harris offer extensive rhetorical analysis of the setup and function of a particular text by Chomsky, with the rest of his publications leaning more toward cataloguing the history of discipline. The Linguistics Wars, for example, focuses mostly on the debates in the late sixties and early seventies between Chomsky and the generative semantics movement. The Linguistics Wars, however, seems to overstate the oppositional nature of the interpretive semantics/generative semantics ‘debate’. That is to say, Harris seems to favor the hypothesis, at least implicitly, that Chomsky succeeded because of the way he managed his specific 29 Indeed, there are many fewer works tackling in a substantive way more recent developments in the history of generative grammar (i.e., from the 1980s onward). Several works that have focused on more recent developments have, however, taken the hagiographic approach (see, for example, the second edition [1986] of Newmeyer’s Linguistic Theory in America and his [1996] Generative Linguistics: a Historical Perspective). Similarly, Haley and Lunsford’s Noam Chomsky (1993), while spending significant time on developments since the eighties, take too many of Chomsky’s claims at face value. Matthews (1993) devotes only nineteen pages to the then current approach Principles and Parameters. While Sampson (2005) focuses largely on more recent developments, he focuses largely on Chomsky’s popularizer Stephen Pinker rather than developments within generative grammar proper. A notable exception to this lack of attention to Chomsky’s more recent works by historians of linguistics is Seuren’s Chomsky’s Minimalism. 30 Indeed, The Linguistics Wars and Harris’ three other publications on Chomsky’s rhetoric focus almost exclusively on Chomsky’s ideas up to the Extended Standard Theory of the early 1970s; Harris has little to say about Chomsky’s ideas since the seventies. Oenbring / 41 rejoinders to the debate; he construes The Linguistics Wars as Italian opera rather than an as small academic debate involving only a handful of actors. Accordingly, The Linguistics Wars spends a lot of time closely cataloguing the he said, she said31 of the specific actors’ rejoinders to the disagreement between interpretive semantics and generative semantics.32 Indeed, although Harris does a great job of chronicling the various actors’ rejoinders — in addition to presenting much valuable information gleaned from his direct correspondence with the invested actors — his account, by favoring the he said, she said, neglects that Chomsky’s works have almost always focused on articulating and rearticulating high-level meta-methodological frameworks. Rather than intimating as Harris does that Chomsky succeeded because of his ability to outmaneuver dissenting voices (there have been plenty of dissenting voices throughout the history of generative grammar), I argue that Chomsky has succeeded largely through his rhetorical packaging 31 Sadly, however, the end result is more he said, he said. However, only a handful of Chomsky’s publications during what has come to be called the linguistics wars directly attempted to refute claims made by the generative semanticists. Indeed, Langendoen, a long-time generativist, suggests in his review of The Linguistics Wars in Language that Harris overstates the oppositional nature of the so-called Extended Standard Theory (articulated by Chomsky starting with “Remarks” [1970] as a reframing of what Chomsky has called the Standard Theory – articulated by Katz and Postal [1964] and Chomsky [1965]). Langendoen’s primary contention with Harris’ book is that “Chomsky did not develop EST as a response to the GS attack on ST, but rather because he was dissatisfied with ST for reasons of his own” (584); the Extended Standard Theory, according to Langendoen, developed out of Chomsky’s own rearticulating of the model of generative grammar stemming from his own intuition of how the model should be set up.32 (Of course, when assessing Langendoen’s analysis of Harris, we should take into consideration that Langendoen, as a generative grammarian, has in his best interest to promote the unconstrained genius reading of Chomsky’s work. What’s more, Langendoen’s claims must be filtered through the fact that he himself participated in a work seeking a return to the Standard Theory away from the Extended Standard Theory [see, for example, Bever, Katz, and Langendoen (1976)].) 32 Oenbring / 42 and repackaging of his grand propositions and his rhetorical construction of grand epistemological ruptures with earlier programs of scholarship. (This is, of course, in addition to the genuine novelty and the appearance of explanatory efficacy built into his propositions.) Indeed, Chomsky’s ability to demarcate the approaches he has favored as the most properly scientific approaches to study human languages has been a result of his constant work to rearticulate and reframe the central models constituting the disciplinary identity of generative syntax and linguistics as a whole — rather than through his work to directly refute the claims of opposing theories. That is to say, rhetorically, Chomsky has not worked as much to defend his own goal as he has to successively move the goal throughout the game. By taking a more expansive view of the history of generative grammar, and considering in a substantial way Chomsky’s rhetorical formulations since his unveiling of the Government and Binding (later renamed Principles and Parameters) in the 1980s (in addition to paying more attention to developments in Chomsky’s writing and thought before Syntactic Structures), I hope to demonstrate that there exist general principles in Chomsky’s modus operandi for his unveiling of new models throughout his body of work; we can, I believe, uncover general principles in Chomsky’s rhetoric throughout his entire oeuvre. These rhetorical approaches have, furthermore, been adopted in varying degrees by his followers in support of the program of generative grammar. Indeed, Chomsky himself has, at certain points in his career, used similar sets of talking points — claims that he has for certain periods of time made over and over. Oenbring / 43 In the coming two chapters, I shall attempt to describe the unique features of each of the various programs that Chomsky has sponsored and attempt to describe how Chomsky used language in order to achieve these successive revolutions, contextualizing Chomsky’s claims within the environments in which they were articulated.33 As I suggest, the various changes to the program of generative grammar that Chomsky has proposed have been more changes in the rhetorical framework used to legitimate the project of generative grammar than substantive changes in core methodological commitments. The historical narrative that I offer in the following two chapters is the backbone of this study, the trunk from which my later analyses will branch. Of course, no more should be said about the various models of generative grammar that Chomsky has espoused without recognizing that Chomsky has himself rhetorically created these ruptures, these seeming epistemological revolutions. Indeed, by working rhetorically to change both the names and the guiding methodologies of the current research paradigm (i.e., changing the disciplinary identity of generative grammar and actively attempting to construct a series of epistemological ruptures), Chomsky has been able to circumscribe boundaries for generative work more or less associated with his own person; through his rhetorical creation of these disciplinary revolutions, Chomsky has written those that disagree with his methods out of the current research paradigm.34 However, I stop my analysis before proceeding to Chomsky’s most recent framework for generative grammar, the Minimalist Program, as that framework is the focus of chapters six and seven. 34 Similarly, Chomsky has successfully spread his own version(s) of the history of generative grammar. This is a task that he has been so successful at that it has become almost impossible for historians of linguistics — even those critical of Chomsky’s project — to avoid the dichotomies that Chomsky has himself set up (e.g., the dichotomy between evaluation procedures and discovery procedures). Indeed, I fully acknowledge that many of the dichotomies that I use are 33 Oenbring / 44 Bloomfield, Logical Positivism, and Autonomous Linguistics In order to account for Chomsky’s dramatic refocusing of the disciplinary identity of linguistics in North America in the later half of the 20th century — and why his rhetoric of language as biology has had such profound effects — one must take into consideration the fact that early in the 20th century many of the most important scholars of language explicitly connected the raison d’être of linguistics as an autonomous field of inquiry with an understanding of language as a social fact; they authorized linguistics as an independent and unique field by accepting that there exists a level of description for languages that can be accessed without positing the existence of structures in the mind. The linguist whose work did most to solidify this orientation toward the study of language was Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949), a prime mover in the founding of the main professional society for the study of linguistics in North America: the Linguistic Society of America (see, for example, Bloomfield [1922 (1970)]). Contemporary Western linguists’ self-understanding of their discipline as a science stems ultimately (like many of the first generation of American linguists [e.g., Boas and Sapir]) from 19th century Germany. There historically-oriented philologists had made impressive achievements postulating sound change laws, speaking openly of their task as Sprachwissenschaft. While Bloomfield, himself stemming from German Jewish essentially the same dichotomies that Chomsky himself has drawn. The difference between Chomsky’s use of these distinctions and my use of these distinctions is this: whereas Chomsky uses these dichotomies to achieve an end, I use point out the dichotomies in order to demonstrate the rhetorical nature of Chomsky’s project. Oenbring / 45 immigrants,35 received from 19th Century German studies of language the notion of linguistics as a science, he, however, forged a distinct scientific identity for American linguistics based on scrupulous empirical study of contemporary languages, largely Native American ones, in their synchronic, static state. In this regard, Bloomfield’s scientific identity for linguistics was distinctly opposed to 19th Century historicallyfocused work. As Hymes and Fought note, the structural methods promoted by Bloomfield became in a substantial way “the central focus and ideology of [the] organized profession” of North American linguists (Hymes and Fought 51). Indeed, there can be little doubt that Bloomfield’s fame and influence was a direct result of his rhetorical success in promoting linguists’ self understanding of their task as an autonomous empirical science. As Hymes and Fought note, Bloomfield “gave recruits to the aspiring science, not yet anywhere a recognized discipline, an overt criterion of identity, [and] an idiom of boundary maintenance” (96). That is to say, Bloomfield offered linguists a clear understanding of what was scientific linguistics and what wasn’t scientific linguistics. As many scholars have acknowledged (e.g., Matthews [1993]; Graffi [2001]), Bloomfield had by the 1920s discarded the mentalist orientation — inspired by the theories of psychologist Wilhelm Wundt — that informed his first major text An Introduction to the Study of Language (1914), preferring instead to understand the object of linguistics as a disembodied social system. Indeed, Bloomfield’s 1922 review of the second edition of the Cours describes the language system and the object of linguistics as 35 His parents were not, however, the source of his training. Oenbring / 46 a “a complex and arbitrary system of social habit, imposed upon the individual, and not directly subject to psychologic interpretation; all psychology will ever be able to do is to provide the general background which makes the thing possible” (107).36 That is to say, Bloomfield takes the Cours’ notion of langue and moves it decisively into the camp of language as a social fact.37 Bloomfield’s conversion to anti-mentalism, largely a product of his connections while at Ohio State with early behaviorist38 psychologist Weiss, should not, however, be overemphasized. Indeed, one of the most important rhetorical tactics that Chomsky and his supporters have used in order to stage their coup was to draw connections between Bloomfield’s followers and behaviorist psychology — with behaviorist psychology itself Similarly, in a 1927 article “On Recent Work,” Bloomfield directly connects the agenda of and impetus behind autonomous linguistics with its avoidance of both introspective methods and positing dubious structures in the mind. Specifically, Bloomfield suggests that: linguists are today agreed upon the essentials of their method; their disagreements can be precisely stated and discussed upon common ground; they do not in their actual work use the troublesome introspective terminology; they are not disturbed by the impossibility, today, of reducing human conduct to physiologic (neurologic) terms; yet they employ no extra-material forces. As, in general, neither psychology nor the other human sciences have reached this point, the quickening of interest in linguistics may be in part due to its occupying a strategic position from which to attack the study of man. (174) As this quote suggests, Bloomfield explicitly connects the identity of linguistic inquiry to its avoidance of “troublesome introspective terminology,” not worrying that contemporary linguistic inquiry posits no physiological mechanisms to undergird their methods. That is to say, Bloomfield explicitly defines the reason for being of linguistics in direct opposition to an undergirding methodological assumption that he himself had used earlier in his career. 37 For more on Bloomfield’s relationship to the Cours see Koerner’s “Leonard Bloomfield and the Cours de Linguistique Général.” 38 Broadly stated, behaviorism is the notion, widespread in American psychology departments in the forties and fifties (and viewed with much scientific cachet in many areas of the academy, including by many linguists), that human and animal behavior can molded in an almost limitless way by the surrounding environment and is ultimately describable in terms of stimuli and responses — a position that seemingly leaves little room for a rich notion of biological nature. 36 Oenbring / 47 being a straw man (see, for example, Language and Mind).39 Rather, Bloomfield’s desire to construe language as a disembodied social system should be understood as a reaction to the speculative, intuition-focused nature of much work in psychology early in the 20th century (i.e., Freud and Jung).40 Accordingly, Bloomfield’s magisterial 1933 summation of the findings of linguistic science up to the time, his book Language, a book that seems remarkably fresh even today, adopts, as the later Bloomfield usually does elsewhere, a perfunctorily behaviorist outlook in the interest of according with the methodological assumptions of scrupulous empirical science.41 (Bloomfield, for example, takes a materialist stance in suggesting that the meaning of any utterance can only be gauged by its effects of upon others [see, for example, 25-33].) An important methodologist, in addition to being an accomplished fieldworker, Bloomfield demonstrated a direct concern with debates over the foundations of science, philosophy, and philosophy of science common in the early to mid 20th century. In his attempt to shore up the foundations of linguistic inquiry, making it a valuable addition to an upcoming unified scientific description of the world, Bloomfield found direct inspiration in the work of logical positivist philosophers by the 1930s (e.g., Carnap [see, for example, Tomalin (93)]), a group that shared Bloomfield’s desire to save inquiry from As Osgood notes in Rieber’s Dialogues on the Psychology of Language and Thought (1982): “Many linguists and psycholinguists use behaviorism as a whipping boy these days — which is not really abnormal in scientific controversy, of course! But unfortunately (and polemically) they usually select the most simple and unsophisticated model of the opposing paradigm — the one most often presented to sophomores in Introductory Psychology” (10). 40 See, for example, Joseph (1995). 41 Indeed, the most polemically behaviorist and materialist of Bloomfield’s pieces, a 1930 article “Linguistics as a Science,” Bloomfield himself later critiqued for its heavy reliance on predictions and pushing too far into the realm of “prophecy” (“Language or Ideas?” 322). 39 Oenbring / 48 metaphysics and the dubious mentalist theories of language and mind that had played an important role early in the 20th Century. Briefly and broadly stated, the logical positivist42 program encompassed the following commitments: a desire to mathematize and formalize propositions under analysis (and a belief that such formalization adds both accuracy and meaning to explanations); a preference for axioms and clear and distinct propositions; a desire to atomize (breaking claims apart into smaller, and supposedly more testable units); a revulsion from metaphysics and metaphor; a distrust of meaning outside of that offered by the formal operations and the manipulation of those formal operations; and, as aforementioned, a desire to avoid positing the existence of dubious mental states. (For a more expansive discussion of Bloomfield’s relationship to contemporary developments in formal logic and philosophy see Tomalin [2006].)43 42 Of course, one should be careful to distinguish between the specific group of analytic philosophers now known as the logical positivists with the more general notion of positivism, a broader tradition of thought. 43 The thirties were, indeed, a time of great optimism that a grand unification was underway at the confluence of scientific empiricism and logical positivism (see, for example, Esper 211). Psychologist Stevens claims, for example, in a famous 1939 article “Psychology and the Science of Science” that: So numerous and insistent are the words of those who have been seized by the spirit of this movement that they swell the pages of several new journals … There are articles by philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists … they all assert essentially that science seeks to generate confirmable propositions by fitting a formal system of symbols (language, mathematics, logic) to empirical observations, and that the propositions of science have empirical significance only when their truth can be demonstrated by a set of concrete operations. (Stevens 222, qtd. in Esper 211) Similarly, Bloomfield’s 1935 presidential address to the LSA, later reprinted in Language (1936), “Language or Ideas?” directly lauds the work of logical positivists of the Vienna Circle (specifically Neurath and Carnap), suggesting their assumptions to offer the proper foundations for inquiry in linguistics and in the sciences as a whole. In this piece Bloomfield is particularly impressed by Neurath and Carnap’s claims that “all scientifically meaningful statements” can be directly translated into “physical terms” – “that is, into statements about movements which can be observed and described in coordinates of space and time” (322). Oenbring / 49 Bloomfield’s 1939 text Linguistic Aspects of Science, his addition to the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, edited by among others, Carnap himself, demonstrates similar deference to logical positivist ideas.44 Accordingly, Bloomfield puts sharp boundaries on the proper scope of linguistic inquiry, placing focus on the phoneme all while working to evacuate notions of meaning from linguistic inquiry. Specifically, Bloomfield suggests that: we do not possess a workable classification of everything in the universe, and, apart from language, we cannot even envisage anything of the sort; the forms of language, on the other hand, thanks to their phonemic structure, can be classified and ordered in all manner of ways and can be subjected to strict agreements of correspondence and operation. For this reason, linguistics classifies speech-forms by forms and not by meaning. (24) In accordance with logical positivist ideals, Bloomfield, in this quote, reduces the primary focus of linguistics to one of its most precisely formulated and mathematically elegant concepts: the phoneme.45 What’s more, Bloomfield attempts to avoid the tricky 44 Although not directly citing any logical positivist philosophers (i.e., taking place before he explicitly promoted their work), Bloomfield’s earlier 1926 article in Language “A Set of Postulates for the Science of Language” demonstrates clear deference to the program of axiomatization. Rather than citing logical positivist philosophers, a group whose work had not yet spread widely, Bloomfield cites Weiss’ “A Set of Postulates for Psychology” as inspiration for his “A Set of Postulates,” a piece whose goal is to precisely and formally define several of the most important concepts in linguistics at the time (e.g., morphemes and phonemes). Regardless of what motivated Bloomfield to write it, “A Set of Postulates” directly inspired important later work, including Bloch’s “A Set of Postulates for Phonemic Analysis.” Indeed, Twadell’s 1935 article in Language Monograph “On Defining the Phoneme” explicitly connects the desire among later linguists to precisely articulate assumptions and define terms with Bloomfield’s “A Set of Postulates” (56). 45 Note that the unification of the sciences proposed here is distinctly logical positivist in nature; it is the product of distinct and autonomous academic disciplines. Oenbring / 50 notion of meaning. Indeed, Bloomfield’s work promoted what would become a long moratorium on the concept of meaning in North American linguistics.46 While Bloomfield’s work no doubt played an important role in promoting linguists’ esteem for precise, formal definitions, anyone familiar with the turgid writing style of much work in generative grammar (i.e., the tradition of thought that has taken up the banner of formal linguistics) will find Bloomfield’s “A Set of Postulates” in comparison remarkably welcoming and readable. Although what has come to be known as (and has taken up the banner of) formal linguistics (i.e., generative grammar) has usually claimed superiority for itself on the basis of what it has claimed to be its more clearly articulated propositions, generative grammar has also, ironically, solidified the assumption among many linguists that scholarship must be difficult to understand and abstract in order to be scientific. (Furthermore, despite its claims to rely on precisely formulated axioms, generative grammar often relies heavily on vague and alluring concepts like deep structure.) The turn toward abstrusely formal prose and logic can be directly traced back to Chomsky and his mentor Zellig Harris. In comparison, Bloomfield’s work seems welcoming and decidedly not enamored with technical, abstruse methodological issues. 46 The suggestion that post-Bloomfieldians were totally repulsed by notions of meaning is part and parcel of most accounts of the history of American linguistics. (For a developed picture see Koerner’s “American Structuralist Linguistics and the ‘Problem of Meaning.”) However, Hymes and Fought protest, suggesting directly that “the analysis of underlying relationships, semantically significant, was pursued by leading linguists of the 1930s” (3). Oenbring / 51 The Post-Bloomfieldians While Bloomfield died in 1949, he remained through his writings the most important patron methodologist in North American linguistics into the early fifties. In fact, in histories of 20th century linguistics it is common to refer to the period of the forties to the early fifties as the post-Bloomfieldian period, a term that I have used and will continue to use in this study. (Other labels for what I shall call the postBloomfieldians include the following: structuralist linguistics, structural linguistics, American structuralism, neo-Bloomfieldian linguistics, Bloomfieldian linguistics, and descriptive linguistics.) It is important to remember, however, that construing all North American scholars of language in this period as a single, unified group neglects their diversity. (Indeed, Hymes and Fought have devoted a whole volume to exploding the myth of the homogeneity of the post-Bloomfieldians.) As Lepschy notes, Bloomfield’s “thought is more complex, at times more torturous and contradictory, and certainly more interesting than it is made out to be” (qtd. in Hymes and Fought 111). Although many post-Bloomfieldian linguists did indeed self-identify using one of the various labels for this group, several of these terms — including the term postBloomfieldian — are terms that have largely been spawned by historians of linguistics rather than by the original linguists themselves. Our willingness to speak of the North American scholars of language in the forties and early fifties as a single unified group can to a large extent be traced to Chomsky and his followers’ persistent use of the straw man to characterize the post-Bloomfieldians; Chomsky and his followers routinely construed what I have chosen to refer to as the post-Bloomfieldians as an uninspired and Oenbring / 52 homogeneous group of scholars. (Post-Bloomfieldian is, however, a term that Chomsky rarely uses. He prefers instead anti-mentalist linguistics or descriptive linguistics, the latter a term used without negative connotation in his mentor Zellig Harris’ Methods in Structural Linguistics [and even in Chomsky’s earliest book-length manuscript The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (e.g., 77)].) While it is indeed an oversimplification to suggest that there ever existed a single unified post-Bloomfieldian method, many of the most prominent linguists in North America in the forties and fifties (e.g., Bernard Bloch, Zellig Harris, Charles Hockett, George Trager, and Robert Hall) did, in fact, share many common methods. In the constellation of methods applied and connected in various forms by these linguists, one can find all of the following methodological commitments and points of disciplinary identity: logical positivism; behaviorism; empiricism; close attention to corpora (collections of texts from which empirical results are obtained, used in order to avoid relying upon intuitions of regarding usage and well-formedness); anti-mentalism; description of texts from the bottom-up, without the mixing of levels (e.g., first analyze phonemes and then proceed to morphemes and eventually discourse features); and, finally, a desire to describe non-Western languages. Fieldwork was, indeed, very important to North American linguists at this time, and it is not insignificant that Bloomfield, a scholar who demonstrated deference to precise mathematical formulations, was the most important patron methodologist of the day. No doubt connecting Bloomfield’s preference for axioms with Chomsky’s eventual rise, psychologist Esper suggests that “Bloomfield’s linking of linguistic meanings to Oenbring / 53 perfected scientific definitions was unfortunate, and irrelevant to the methodology of descriptive linguistics” (Esper 219). If, indeed, one’s desire is to describe a language in an empirically scrupulous way, formalism and explicit definitions, although seemingly increasing the explanation of the analysis, can often be more of a hindrance than a help. Bloch and Trager’s 1942 text Outline of Linguistic Analysis is an important and representative linguistics textbook of post-Bloomfieldian era.47 Although citing few primary sources directly due to the pedagogic nature of the text, Bloch and Trager, nevertheless, demonstrate clear deference to Bloomfield’s language as a social fact understanding of the Cours. In the book’s earliest basic definitions of terms, Bloch and Trager define language as a “system of arbitrary vocal symbols” (5). Continuing along these lines, Bloch and Trager define the grammar of language as “simply an orderly description of the way people in a given society talk — of the sounds that people utter in various situations, and the acts which accompany or follow the sounds” (6). Alluding in the next paragraph to the arbitrary nature of the sign using a version of the horse/Equus caballus example articulated in the Cours (i.e., with the Cours clearly in mind), Bloch and Trager define the linguist as “a scientist whose subject-matter is language, and his task is to analyze and classify the facts of speech as he hears them uttered by native speakers or as he finds them recorded in writing” (8). That is to say, they define the task of the linguist as analyzing and classifying speech and texts with little attention paid to explanation. They continue later, “attempts to answer the question Indeed, Anderson suggests Trager to be “perhaps the most radical of those claiming to develop Bloomfield’s thought directly, especially regarding the rigor (and vigor) with which they rejected any role for considerations of meaning in linguistic analysis or description” (278-279). 47 Oenbring / 54 Why? in other ways — by appeals to psychology, philosophy, or abstract logic — may seem esthetically more satisfying, but are never anything better than guesses, unprovable and fruitless” (9). The task of the linguist to Bloch and Trager is quite clear: to carefully catalogue empirical findings, limiting explanations to account for the empirical results, all while avoiding positing dubious structures in the mind or making reference to underlying psychology or biology. While the post-Bloomfieldians avoided notions of psychology and biology in the interests of making their work more scientific, their avoidance of these notions should not be misconstrued as their lacking a concept of a limiting human biology; postBloomfieldian anti-mentalism should not be misconstrued as something resembling radical poststructuralist anti-essentialism (e.g., those cultural and feminist theorists who suggest that standards of physical attractiveness are purely cultural codes and are not motivated in any way by underlying human biology). For example, prominent postBloomfieldian Martin Joos, whose assertion that languages can “differ from each other without limit and in unpredictable ways” has been a favorite topos for attack among generativists (see, for example, Chomsky [1964: 77], Anderson [1985: 224], Newmeyer [2005: ix]) was, nevertheless, not afraid to elsewhere define language as “a set of neural patterns in the speech center” (1948: 99, qtd. in Matthews 128); even Joos was not against stating in print that human language is, at its core, a biological phenomenon.48 Note, however, that Joos’ “without limit and in unpredictable ways” also became a rallying point for some anthropological linguists (see Hymes and Fought [1981: 57]). 48 Oenbring / 55 Post-Bloomfieldian Phonology While the post-Bloomfieldians did, in fact, pay attention to most of what we now recognize as the major areas of study in linguistics (including phonetics, phonology, morphology, and even syntax49), one of the primary concerns of the post-Bloomfieldians was the phoneme.50 That is to say, their unique concept of the phoneme served the postBloomfieldians as a point of disciplinary identity — (i.e., a concept that helped organize how the discipline understood itself and its unique offerings to human knowledge).51 Of course, how exactly to define a phoneme has been a point of some contention, and many players (including, of course, Chomsky52) have attempted to offer unique definitions. Having one’s definition of the phoneme serve as the definition of the phoneme has, I hope to show, been the key to Top Linguist status. Broadly stated, the phoneme is the smallest possible distinct sound or unit of structure in a language that plays some part in distinguishing meaning (meaning being always a tricky, vaguely defined notion). In many accounts, cataloguing the phonemes of a language leads to an inventory of the unique distinct sounds of a language. To use an example from English, we can, largely unproblematically, place the initial sounds of the words tag, take, and tinker under the same phoneme /t/.53 (Sound should not, of course, A nice example of syntax in the post-Bloomfieldian tradition is Fries’ 1952 textbook The Structure of English. 50 See, for example, Trager (1934) and Swadesh (1934). 51 As Anderson notes, the post-Bloomfieldians “had a strong sense of professional identity, reinforced by the apparatus of an orthodox academic discipline (a professional society, annual meetings, the summer Linguistic Institutes, several journals clearly dedicated to their work, etc.); to a significant extent, that identity was based on the specific claims of structuralist theory to a uniquely priviledged and scientific view of an important object of study, human language” (311). 52 See, for example, Chomsky and Halle’s The Sound Pattern of English. 53 Phonemes, as suggested here are placed between slashes in their textual representation. 49 Oenbring / 56 be conflated with orthography, as the well-known example of ph and f demonstrates. The phonemic level of description should not, furthermore, be confused with the phonetic level, which seeks to present the most precise description of the physical sounds of human language.) In certain understandings of the phoneme, a more abstract underlying phoneme can be realized differently based on its environment of articulation. In such an understanding of the phoneme, the different speech sounds that constitute the same phoneme are often called allophones. For example, we can say in English that [pʰ] (aspirated p)54 as in pit and [p] (unaspirated p) as in spit are allophones of the phoneme /p/ because native speakers treat them as the same sound. The linguist can develop a system of rules that accurately describes when the different allophones of a phoneme occur. For example, in English /p/ is realized as aspirated p whenever it occurs as the only consonant at the beginning of a stressed syllable or word.55 As this example suggests, phonemes are, by definition, structured relationships that rely upon no theory of mind or biology to undergird explanation; the various allophones of a phoneme can be described as the products of differing phonetic environments. This suggests why the concept of the phoneme was an attractive point of disciplinary identity for the post- 54 Apirated means co-occurring with the release of a large puff of air. Unaspirated means that no large puff of air is released. 55 When the particular sounds of phonemes can be accounted for by phonological rules that only refer to other aspects of sound structure (e.g., stress, clusters, voicing, etc.) and are unconscious and obligatory, this is referred to as complementary distribution. When one allows for human variables such as style of speaking in selecting the particular sounds of phonemes, this relationship is known as free variation. This is not, however, to say that free variation is unpredictable; rather the difference is that in complementary distribution, unlike free distribution, phonological rules are unconscious and obligatory. Oenbring / 57 Bloomfieldians; the concept of the phoneme encodes an elegant formal relationship that relies upon no theory of meaning or mind.56 Unlike his contemporary Edward Sapir, whose definition of the phoneme focused on native speakers’ intuitions regarding the reality of phonemes (see, for example, Sapir’s “The Psychological Reality of the Phoneme”), Bloomfield’s mature definition of the phoneme avoids reliance on speakers’ intuitions regarding the boundaries between distinct speech sounds.57 Following the understanding of language as a set of differences articulated in the Cours, Bloomfield’s Language, in its most technical explication of the phoneme, defines the concept entirely according to the observed appearance of speech sounds in language (see Language 78-79) (i.e., in a distributional [statistical/factual way]); Bloomfield’s defines the concept of the phoneme by reference to the empirical observation of minimal pairs (pairs of words that differ by only one sound in the same position). In his technical definition, Bloomfield uses the example of the word pin, which we easily recognize “ends with the same sound as fin, sin, and tin” (78). After laying out by the entire repertoire of minimal pairs of pin, Bloomfield concludes his ‘experiment,’ stating decisively that “further experiment fails to reveal any more replaceable parts in the word pin: we conclude that the distinctive features of this word are three indivisible units … each of the three is a minimum unit of distinctive soundfeature, a phoneme” (79). 56 For a different account of post-Bloomfieldian phonology see Fudge (1995). The most thorough take of the history of phonological theory is Stephen Anderson’s Phonology in the Twentieth Century, an incisive account, despite being decidedly pro-Chomsky. 57 Oenbring / 58 As this example suggests, Bloomfield’s theory of the phoneme is set of structured relations between sounds, relying on no theory of mind to explain or legitimate it. What’s more, Bloomfield’s mature theory of the phoneme seems to — I stress only seems to — avoid extensive reliance upon speaker’s intuitions to mark distinct speech sounds. (One should, however, remember that Bloomfield’s precise definition of the phoneme is only part of a much broader discussion of phonemes — of 34 pages — in which much more ‘commonsense’ understandings of the concept [i.e., based on our intuitions of distinct speech sounds] rule throughout.) What this method leads to, at least in theory, is an empirically-scrupulous inventory of the specific phonemes of a given language. While radical empiricism is, for sure, present at the core of Bloomfield’s mature theory of the phoneme, Bloomfield largely avoided pushing this commitment to its end. However, many post-Bloomfieldians attempted to push Bloomfield’s concept of the phoneme in more extreme directions. For example, although Bloomfield did not go far with the program of developing explicit, rigorous, procedures to define regularities such as the phoneme, his follower Zellig Harris did (see Lin [2002]).58 Similarly, while acknowledging that what they are offering is more of a “general guide to the technique” than “rules to be obeyed in every particular” (40), Bloch and Trager’s Outline, nevertheless, offers a numbered list of steps for analyzing the phonemes of a particular language; they push Bloomfield’s ideas regarding phonemic analysis to their logical conclusion. Continuing, Bloch and Trager advise the would-be linguist to “repeat the 58 Harris directly states in the preface of his Methods in Structural Linguistics that the book owes most to Bloomfield and his book Language. Oenbring / 59 operation for all other positions,” in order to “construct a master list of all phonemes” (Outline of Linguistic Analysis 41). In Bloch and Trager’s understanding, linguistics is an unapologetically empirical discipline. Thus, although admitting that one can develop a catalogue of the phonemes of a language based on the phonetic characteristics of allophones (e.g., “we can group the English consonant phonemes into voiced and voiceless, or into stops, spirants nasals, and lateral … and so on” [45]), Bloch and Trager insist that a better definition of the phoneme is based around the notion of a structural set: a list of occurrences. A structural set is, according to Bloch and Trager, the following: “a group of all the phonemes which occur in a given phonetic environment and hence, in that position, directly contrast with each other.” The ultimate ideal is an account of what Bloch and Trager call phonemic structure: “an exhaustive catalog of such sets, each defined by the common function of its members” (Bloch and Trager 45). While such a catalog of sets would, indeed, be a beautiful empirical achievement, its utility as anything other than a catalog is unclear. In some versions of the history of American linguistics, a corollary to the postBloomfieldian empirically-focused theory of the phoneme is the notion that the linguist should not mix levels when defining phonemes (i.e., that phonemes should be thought of as totally distinct from morphology, syntax, and discourse features and that these boundaries between levels should be clear). Although this claim was indeed stated in work by important post-Bloomfieldian methodologists Hockett (1942 [1957]) and Harris (1951), Hockett’s and Harris’ proscription against mixing levels does not appear to have been widely adopted by American linguists. Rather the inclusion of the proscription Oenbring / 60 against mixing levels in accounts of post-Bloomfieldian methods seems to be more a product of Chomsky and his followers seeking to articulate clear and distinct differences between their work and the post-Bloomfieldians than something stemming from a the true state of the discipline in the 1950s; Chomsky and followers such as Newmeyer have used the alleged post-Bloomfieldian proscription against mixing levels as a way to tell the story of a neat break that occurred with the rise of generative grammar. As Hymes and Fought note, “ideological forces, reinforced by ignorance, are no doubt at work” in how Chomsky and his followers tell the history of American linguistics (127). Citing rhetorician Kenneth Burke, Hymes and Fought continue, suggesting that “no doubt there is a purely poetic motive as well: polarized conflict, focused on a single issue, enhances any narrative” (cf. Burke 1968:380-409). Harris and Chomsky: Methods and Influence Traditionally, accounts of how Chomsky caused his dramatic shift in the disciplinary identity of linguistics focus on the differences and similarities between Chomsky’s works and the work of the earlier scholars in the field of linguistics (most notably what have come to be called post-Bloomfieldians). While differences between Chomsky’s work and that of the post-Bloomfieldians is, of course, an important thread, a thread that figures substantially in this chapter, one should be skeptical of accounts that assume in a blasé manner that Chomsky’s work was totally unlike that of previous linguists (indeed, one of the primary goals of Matthews [1993] is to emphasize the continuity between Chomsky’s work and the post-Bloomfieldians). Indeed, it is arguable Oenbring / 61 that Chomsky’s himself has been the driving force behind tendency to frame the early history of generative grammar as Chomsky vs. the post-Bloomfieldians, something that he has done in large part by defining his project against that of his mentor Zellig Harris. Born in 1928 and a true product of Depression-era Philadelphia Jewish culture, Chomsky received his first introduction to linguistics as an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania in the mid to late forties, a time in which linguistics was still a very small discipline, from leading post-Bloomfieldian linguist Zellig Harris (1909-1992), the scholar who would eventually serve as his Ph.D. mentor. While all mentors play a role in shaping the education of their students, Harris’ influence on Chomsky is, according to both Chomsky and others, especially notable.59 For one, Chomsky has claimed that he received his first formal introduction to linguistics as an undergraduate student reading proofs of Harris’ Methods of Structural Linguistics (LSLT 25; The Chomsky Reader 7).60 More importantly, Harris demonstrated to Chomsky that one can balance consistent political engagement with the cloister of academic life. (Harris was at the time an important player in Philadelphia Jewish radical intellectual circles.) Indeed, Chomsky has suggested on several occasions that his interactions with Harris contributed in part to his decision to pursue academic life instead of following long term his desire to work on Kibbutzim dedicated to Israeli-Palestinian partnership (e.g., The Chomsky Reader 7). Harris participated in political work throughout his life, and in his later years — inspired 59 For a good run through of biographic details, especially in regard to the relationship between Chomsky and Harris , see Barsky (1997), a text that, while informative, takes almost all of Chomsky’s accounts at face value. Conversely, for a quick, useful, and non-sycophantic overview of important biographical details see Tomalin (109 -112). 60 One can find evidence in support of Chomsky’s claims to have read the proofs of Harris’ Methods in the preface of the book. Oenbring / 62 for certain at least in part by the success of his most famous student’s political work — developed his most comprehensive analysis of contemporary society for the volume The Transformation of Capitalist Society, a text that was published posthumously in 1997. Most importantly, Harris’ work had a profound impact on the methods of scholarship of his most famous student; the methods that Chomsky has espoused have throughout his career demonstrated clear debt to his mentor. The debts include all of the following: an obsession with methodology; interest in notions of economy (a version of Ockham’s razor borrowed from the logical positivists); a willingness to posit byzantine and abstract logical processes; and even the very notion of transformations (a concept that would become a hallmark of Chomskyan linguistics) — a notion Harris had imported from formal logic (see, for example, Carnap’s The Logical Syntax of Language) and/or by other accounts linear algebra. More generally, Harris was largely an armchair scholar, not, like many other post-Bloomfieldians, a fieldworker devoted to the description of Native American languages (see, for example, the work of Hockett, Swadesh, Voegelin, and others); Harris instilled in Chomsky a belief that linguistics can be done by massaging data sets in the office rather than through tireless work with informants. Summarizing Chomsky’s mentor’s influence on his protégé, Randy Harris61 notes in The Linguistics Wars that the elder Harris “had a fixation on esoteric, if not peripheral, issues, and a preoccupation with methodology which far outstripped even that of his contemporaries. He, too, had a somewhat unusual background for a Bloomfieldian 61 No relation, of course. Oenbring / 63 — coming not from the rolled-up-sleeves-and-loosened-collar world of anthropology, but the bookish, intensely logical world of Semitic philology” (38). Accordingly, “Chomsky’s education reflected Harris’s interests closely. In involved work in philosophy, logic, and mathematics well beyond the normal training for a linguist” (38). Indeed, Chomsky’s constant interest in questions of methodology throughout his career — even when his methods have seemingly been at odds with empirical reality — can directly be traced back to the influence of his mentor. As I have intimated, Zellig Harris’ scholarship in the forties and fifties was largely an attempt to formalize procedures of American structuralist linguistics in order give the system greater rigor.62 Harris, for example, clearly states in the introduction to his famous 1952 book Methods in Structural Linguistics (the manuscript of which was completed in 1947) that “the research methods are arranged here in the form of the successive procedures of analysis imposed by the working linguist upon his data. It is hoped that presentation of the methods in procedural form and order may help reduce the impression of sleight of hand that often accompanies more subtle linguistic analysis” (1). As this quote suggests, Harris sought to develop formal procedures in order to reduce the intuition, guesswork, and the “impression of sleight of hand”63 that he saw as limitations to contemporary methods in American linguistics. This was an interest that Harris maintained throughout his career. (See, for example, Harris’ 1968 book Mathematical Structures of Language and his co-written 1989 volume with others The Form of Information in Science.) 63 Note that Harris’ interest is in reducing the impression of sleight of hand rather than ending the sleight of hand in itself. 62 Oenbring / 64 Broadly stated, Harris’ project in the forties and fifties was to develop rigorous empirical procedures for analyzing a corpus of data in a bottom-up manner (i.e., from the smallest elements [e.g., phonemes] to the largest elements [e.g., discourse features]).64 (Although Chomsky argued against clear divisions between levels in Syntactic Structures, he still, demonstrating Harris’ influence, separated between levels in his largest manuscript of the fifties, 1955’s The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory.) Harris’ interest in moving from smaller elements to larger elements demonstrates his faith in inductive procedures, a faith undergirding the logical positivist movement. Harris’ ultimate goal: to develop a thorough, explicitly-formulated set of methods that can account for all relevant features of a corpus. (The vagueness of this goal is not merely a result of my specific wording of it.) Accordingly, Harris’ major work of the period, Methods, seems obsessed with methodical minutiae. Indeed, Harris’ highly technical methodological expositions, in particular those dealing with phonemes and morphemes, dominate the body of the nearly 400 page book. Harris’ analyses in Methods are brilliant but difficult to wade through. While Harris demonstrated a sincere belief in the value of — in addition to rhetorically over-representing his exclusive use of — inductive procedures, we must remember that Harris day-to-day methods were not so purely rigid and formal. Indeed, Chomsky has to a large degree rhetorically created this interpretation of his mentor’s project in order to define himself against it. 64 See, for example, Harris’ explanation in (2002: 2). Oenbring / 65 In other work — most directly in his 1952 article in Language “Discourse Analysis” (the title of which, has, ironically, become the name of one of the most important, and, depending the scholar doing the analysis, one of the most radical, language as culture approaches to the study of human language) — Harris introduced the concept of transformations, a concept that would become deeply associated with Chomsky’s program, into linguistic theory as way to account for in an empirically scrupulous way, the arrangement of elements in discourse while reducing the number of possible syntactic constructions down to a core kernel of mathematically-elegant formulae (8-9). Harris’ ultimate goal for the concept of transformations was to account for, and describe using formalism, syntactic “equivalence chains” (10): strings of syntax that can replace one another. In Harris’ presentation, the process of finding equivalence chains (a.k.a. equivalences) starts off by determining “which elements are to be taken as equivalent to each other” (10). One of the easier-to-explain examples of an equivalence that Harris offers in the article are the strings the middle of autumn and the end of October, which both occur in the same environment in Harris’ hypothetical corpus: after the string The trees turn here in — (see 6). While the article “Discourse Analysis” is, characteristically, quite bold in its theorizing about methods, the examples of transformations that Harris offers in the article remain very simple throughout. Indeed, much of Harris’ analysis of transformations focuses on the example of the passive transformation (e.g., Casals plays the cello and The cello is played by Casals [19]), a trick of exposition picked up by his most famous student. (For example, Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures deduces much from Oenbring / 66 examples relating to a particular morpho-syntactic phenomenon in English auxiliary verbs — what other linguists have called affix-hopping.)65 Explaining the differences between his project and generative approaches (and, for certain, rhetorically over-representing his empirical focus to some degree), Harris suggests in a 1990 piece tracing the development of his own theories “The Background of Transformational and Metalanguage Analysis,” later republished in The Legacy of Zellig Harris, that the differences between his theories (analysis) and those of generative linguists is that “analysis has to identify as far as possible every regularity in speech or writing, and above all to recognize degeneracies, whereas generating can be done with just enough information about the language to distinguish in a general way every utterance from those systematically identical with it” (7). That is to say, whereas the methods that Harris espouses actively look for “degeneracies” and counterexamples, generative grammarians assume that there exists an underlying, mathematically-elegant order to syntactic constructions. Indeed, one could say that the primary difference between Harris’ and Chomsky’s mature projects is that the former, unlike the latter, does not assume that the formalisms (i.e., the ‘metalanguage’) linguists use to describe human languages can be understood as 65 Although Harris introduced the concept of transformations to linguistic theory, transformations have, of course, become deeply associated with Chomsky’s project. As I have suggested, Harris’ motivation for introducing the concept of the transformation was to reduce the number of constructions necessary to account for the distribution of items in a corpus. This is markedly different from the motivation for transformations in generative grammar: as a way to describe the movement of morphological features or words from a hypothesized level of meaning to a hypothesized level of sound within a single sentence, all while (at least in theory) making the whole system simpler and more mathematically elegant. Conversely, in Harris’ work, the importance of transformations lies more in its ability to account for periphrasis across a corpus, with emphasis on empirical adequacy. Oenbring / 67 a standing in for structures in the mind. As Nevin suggests, perhaps the most important feature of Harris’ project, a feature that distinguishes it from generative grammar is that the latter “asserts the existence of a biologically innate metalanguage” (Nevin xxvii), something which Harris does not. Similarly, Harris does not make bold claims that the methods of analysis that he offers are the ‘correct’ ones or are the only ones that can accurately describe the processes he is describing; he, unlike his student, largely avoids what philosophers of science call realist claims. Harris, for example, states directly in the introduction to Methods that the procedures he offers “are merely ways of arranging the original data” (3).66 Creating the Research Space of Generative Grammar If my account of the history of generative grammar has appeared to be as much an account of the history of philosophy in the early 20th century as an account of the history of linguistics, that is to some degree correct. Indeed, one aspect of Chomsky’s early work that has seen remarkably little commentary from historians of linguistics (with Tomalin’s recent [2006] book Linguistics and the Formal Sciences being a notable exception) is the fact that his earliest works were as much attempts to participate in contemporary discussions in formal symbolic logic, philosophy, and the fledgling field of information theory as they were geared at furthering discussions going on in the field of linguistics at 66 Conversely, Chomsky has, until recently, claimed that generative grammar is geared toward uncovering real truths. Chomsky, for example, suggests in Language and Responsibility that “At least in my opinion, it has always seemed evident that only the ‘realist’ interpretation of linguistic theory, whether procedural or not, provides the basis for a significant discipline, one that is worth pursuing. Oenbring / 68 the time. (Indeed, it is for certain significant that Chomsky’s first full publication was in The Journal of Symbolic Logic and that Chomsky’s first book-length manuscript was entitled The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory.) That is to say, in order to build legitimacy for his theories regarding human syntax, Chomsky first had to find a way to articulate his theories using the argumentative, discursive, and methodological means of an audience willing to accept his theories. This was done before he could attempt to reframe the disciplinary identity of the field where he would become — and for approaching half a century would remain — its most influential theorist. This is not to say that Chomsky went out his way to search for an audience interested in his theories. Rather Chomsky’s work, like the work of all scholars, has been deeply influenced by his own personal history and the intellectual climate of his development as a scholar; Chomsky’s work developed out of a complex negotiation between Chomsky as independent scholar/agent and his immediate scholarly environment. Indeed, this element of the story of generative grammar is deeply entwined with Chomsky’s personal history and the unique features of the intellectual scenes of Philadelphia in the forties and Cambridge in the fifties. Nevertheless, Chomsky has a long tradition of looking to other areas of scholarship in order to find disciplinary conventions and grounds for his knowledge claims in order to shore up his claims in the study of language proper; Chomsky has consistently looked outside the study of language for grounding concepts and claims that he can use to undergird his claims in the area of linguistics. Oenbring / 69 Chomsky’s 1951 M.A. thesis The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew, oddly merely a revision of his 1949 B.A. thesis, both written under Harris, is, for certain, an interesting artifact from the perspective of intellectual history. From a rhetorical perspective, Morphophonemics’ interest is less certain, seeing that it, like Chomsky’s massive 1955 manuscript The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (LSLT), wasn’t published until the 1970s. (That is to say, it is unclear what rhetorical effect any unpublished text can have on an audience. [One should, however, remember that parts of LSLT were available in mimeograph form well before its 1975 publication.]) An inwardlooking piece, Morphophonemics is clearly a product of Chomsky’s unique intellectual experience. Morphophonemics, for example, lists only five sources. These are: Harris’ Methods; an article by famous anthropological and typological linguist Joseph Greenberg (1950); an article by Hockett (1950) on the scientific status of linguists methods; a 1943 article “On the Simplicity of Ideas” by Nelson Goodman, the Penn-based analytic philosopher who helped Chomsky secure a four year fellowship at Harvard (Goodman is well-known for his advocacy for constructional systems, constructive nominalism,67 and notions of economy); and even one of Chomsky’s own unpublished manuscripts. Armed with only a master’s degree, Chomsky studied for four years at Harvard as a member of the Society of Fellows between 1951 and 1955. With few restrictions on the shape and boundaries of his work, Chomsky was free to make broad and novel connections both in his scholarship and around Cambridge. At Harvard were several 67 Usually nominalism is contrasted with realism, with the former school of thought suggesting that descriptions of nature do not correspond directly to reality and the latter suggesting that they do. Constructive (or inscriptional ) nominalism suggests that the scholars is developing a consciously artificial system of description that is nominalist in its claims. Oenbring / 70 scholars that would play important roles in the development of generative grammar, including: Eric Lenneberg and George Miller, both biologically-focused psychologists with interests in linguistics, both of whom would play an important role in Chomsky’s reception outside linguistics; W.V.O. Quine, a logician and analytic philosopher who received Chomsky’s works generally in a cold manner (but whose famous piece “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” a critique of contemporary empiricism, has, nevertheless, been rhetorically misconstrued by Chomsky and his followers as evidence for the existence of a crisis in empiricist philosophy and, moreover, as support for the nascent rationalism in Chomsky’s works68 [see, for example, Chomsky’s LSLT: 33]); Roman Jakobson, the literary theorist and member of the biologically-focused Prague School of phonology; and, finally, Morris Halle, Jakobson’s student who would later work with Chomsky in developing the field of generative phonology. Nearby at MIT was logician and Carnapdisciple Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, a scholar that would both influence and provide enthusiastic support for Chomsky’s work.69 In 1953 Chomsky’s first academic publication “Systems of Syntactic Analysis” appeared in the Journal of Symbolic Logic. Following the work of Bar-Hillel, “Systems” is, broadly stated, an attempt to apply formal symbolic systems of syntax like those being That is to say, Quine’s critique of contemporary empiricism does not necessarily equate to support for rationalism. For a quick overview of the distinctions between Quine and Chomsky’s projects see (George [1986]). Also, see the assessment of Quine’s work by Chomsky and others, with Quine’s responses, in the 1969 edited volume Words and Objections. Chomsky’s analysis hinges mostly on his well-known arguments about language acquisition. In response to Chomsky’s critique, Quine accuses Chomsky of straw manning his ideas. Specifically, Quine suggests that “Chomsky’s remarks leave me with feelings at once of reassurance and frustration. What I find reassuring is that he nowhere clearly disagrees with my position. What I find frustrating is that he expresses disagreement with what he thinks to be my position.” 69 For a nice overview of the intellectual scene at Cambridge in the fifties and the author’s place in it, see Bar-Hillel’s Language and Information. 68 Oenbring / 71 developed by analytic philosophers Quine, Goodman, and Carnap to natural human languages. Directly connecting the goals of the paper to Goodman and Quine’s constructive nominalism,70 Chomsky suggests that the goal of the paper is “to develop an adequate notion of syntactic category within an inscriptional nominalistic framework” (242).71 (Although “Systems of Syntactic Analysis” claims to be “an attempt to formalize a certain part of the linguist’s generalized syntax language” (242), the boundaries between formal syntax and syntax describing natural languages (i.e., syntax in the linguist’s sense) are not clearly defined in the piece; Chomsky conflates syntax in the linguist’s sense with the purely formal syntax of the logician. Rhetorically timid, Chomsky’s “Systems” avoids grandiose claims, presenting itself more as a development of post-Bloomfieldian linguistics rather than a movement beyond post-Bloomfieldian linguists, largely by connecting its findings to Harris’ work.72 What’s more following many analytic philosophers, with “Systems” Chomsky begins what would become an important tradition in Chomsky and his followers’ style of writing: inaccessible and unexplained formalism. Consider the following extract from “Systems”: 70 Basically constructive nominalism suggests all of the following commitments: a distaste for abstractions (including those provided by set theory); a preference to break propositions up into individual units; a belief that systems of symbolic logic can and should be built from the ground up; and a belief that symbolic logic, although fabricated, offers more than tautology. For more see Quine and Goodman’s “Steps Toward a Constructive Nominalism” and Goodman’s The Structure of Appearance (especially 37-46). 71 Constructive nominalism was also an expressly stated goal of Harris’ project. 72 While Chomsky avoids critique of Harris’ work (after all, he still was Harris’ student) in “Systems”, Bar-Hillel’s similarly-themed 1954 article in Language “Logical Syntax and Semantics” isn’t afraid to both directly critique Harris’ project and to be much bolder in its attempts to break down the boundaries between logical syntax and linguistic syntax. Bar-Hillel suggests, for example, that “I think it is correct to say that the differences between the structural linguist and the formal logician is one of stress and degree rather than kind” (235). Oenbring / 72 (“Systems of Syntactic Analysis” 255) By conflating the technical language of formal logic with linguistic analysis, Chomsky makes his work inaccessible to those linguists not familiar with formal logic. What’s more, by focusing largely on natural language, Chomsky makes his project uninteresting to pure logicians. As this suggests, Chomsky even in his earliest work, was crafting a unique set of methods — methods accessible only to a unique discourse community; that is to say, he was forming a discipline. In completion of the requirements of his Harvard fellowship, Chomsky in 1955 finalized a massive 752 page manuscript The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, a chapter of which, “Transformational Analysis,” also served as his 1955 dissertation from Penn. Also in 1955, Chomsky took up, with Halle’s help, a position in the Department of Modern Languages and Research Laboratory of Electronics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the institution where he has remained his entire career — minus several extended stays at other universities (most notably an appointment for several months in the English department at UC Berkeley during the 1966-67 academic year). Now holding the title Institute Professor Emeritus, Chomsky’s influence in the field of linguistics can, at least in part, be tied his ability to institutionalize his vision of what the discipline can and should be by having a prominent place in MIT’s Linguistics department from its Oenbring / 73 beginning (i.e., he has overseen the development of a department at a well-funded and prestigious university, remaining an important figure in the department for over half a century). Throughout his career, Chomsky has forged the identity of generative grammar in a foundry of conflict and other early publications make this clear. While Chomsky had used the appearance of rigor offered by formal and symbolic logic to undergird his analysis of natural languages in “Systems of Syntactic Analysis,” a tradition that has remained in his work to the present, Chomsky in later work directly criticizes formal logic and syntax, their relevance in the study of human languages, and the usefulness of their descriptions as a whole. (This skepticism toward logical syntax can, however, be traced back to Harris.) Chomsky suggests, for example, in a 1955 article in Language with an almost identical title to a piece by Bar-Hillel in the same journal a year earlier “Logical Syntax and Semantics: Their Linguistic Relevance” that: logical syntax and semantics provide no grounds for determining synonymy and consequence relations. The only assistance that these disciplines offer to linguistics is to point out that consequence is a relation between sentences, and synonymy a relation between words, and that if we knew the results of linguistic analysis before such analysis was undertaken, we could write down an immense list of synonyms and valid inferences. The word ‘formal’ disguises this triviality. Although in a previous article in The Journal of Symbolic Logic Chomsky sought to conflate logical syntax with the syntax of natural languages, in “Their Linguistic Oenbring / 74 Relevance” Chomsky now directly criticizes logical syntax for an audience of linguists in the journal Language. Given that by the 1960s he would openly make appeals to abstract mental entities — something directly opposed to constructive nominalist ideals, Chomsky’s reasons for framing his work as part of the tradition of constructive nominalist tradition in his earliest work are unclear, other than as a rhetorical maneuver for the purposes of undergirding and legitimating his program of research. However, Chomsky quit openly espousing constructive nominalism by the end of the fifties. Indeed, some scholars have expressed skepticism that Chomsky ever worked within a constructive nominalist framework. Hiorath (1974) suggests, for example, that “the occurrence of the term ‘nominalistic’ here did not reflect any mature belief in philosophical nominalism. To my knowledge in Chomsky’s later writing there is no trace of nominalism” (37).73 It is an interesting fact that although Chomsky has made much of his name as a scholar by his claims that the study of language should ultimately be grounded in appeals to the existence of structures in the mind, several of Chomsky’s earliest works include direct statements against such mentalist appeals. (Remember that anti-mentalism was an important element of both post-Bloomfieldian linguistics and constructive nominalist 73 It is indeed interesting that although responses to the work of Quine, Goodman, and Carnap form the backbone of Chomsky’s earliest publications, Chomsky’s references to these analytical philosophers largely evaporate by the 1960s; by the 1960s Chomsky no longer required their work to undergird his own line of inquiry as generative grammar was becoming its own discipline. Indeed, in his most important methodological text of the 60s, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Chomsky cites only Quine’s Word and Object. Similarly, in his two most important methodological texts after the 60s, Lectures on Government and Binding and The Minimalist Program, the central propositions of the latter dealing with notions of economy, a notion promoted by Goodman, Chomsky cites only Goodman peripherally in Lectures and cites none of Quine, Goodman, and Carnap in The Minimalist Program.73 Oenbring / 75 philosophy.) Chomsky, for example, suggests in “Their Linguistic Relevance” that “if a linguist has qualms about establishing or using somehow the fact that oculist and eyedoctor are synonyms, he can avoid all fear of mentalism by the formal procedure of setting down this fact as a meaning postulate” (38).74 As is clear in this statement, Chomsky, following the state of scholarship at the time, presents mentalism as something to avoid (read: error). Steinberg (1999) finds other similar statements in Chomsky’s early manuscripts and publications, mostly focused in The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (and less clearly in Syntactic Structures). Whether Chomsky’s anti-mentalist statements in the fifties were perfunctory given the state of post-Bloomfieldian linguistics or wholehearted, we will never know, but Chomsky’s reluctance to immediately come out of the closet as a mentalist in the 1950s demonstrates at bare minimum rhetorical awareness. The Syntactic Structures Period The publication of Chomsky’s 1957 book Syntactic Structures is, for certain, the most romanticized moment in the history of generative grammar, and, indeed, the history of linguistics as whole. That is to say, many accounts of the so-called Chomskyan revolution locate the revolution in the publication of Syntactic Structures. The first sentence of Smith and Wilson’s popular-audience-focused Modern Linguistics: the Results of Chomsky’s Revolution is typical in its matter-of-factness and its hyperbole: “the publication of Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures, in 1957, marked the start of a 74 Nevertheless, the if/then structure of this sentence suggests that Chomsky may be making accommodations for linguists with such qualms, qualms that he doesn’t necessarily share. Oenbring / 76 revolution in linguistics” (9). Such simplistic revolutionary historiography has become common in many forums, including linguistics textbooks, popular-audience-focused accounts like Smith and Wilson’s, respectable historical accounts aimed at academic audiences like those produced by Newmeyer, and even a handful of videos aimed at K-12 students (see, for example, The Human Language Series).75 Although Harris makes many excellent points in his analyses of Chomsky’s rhetoric in Syntactic Structures, several of these points which I directly rehash, Harris’ analyses seem — especially in his full-length article devoted to analyzing Syntactic Structures, “Argumentation in Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures” — overly sympathetic with Chomsky’s project. Despite his claims to the contrary, many of Harris’ analyses lean toward “idolatry” (107) of Chomsky. For one, Harris falls into the trap, a trap that is easy for a rhetorician of science (see, for example, John Angus Campbell’s work on Darwin’s rhetoric [e.g., 1986]) of tying a text’s social efficacy (i.e., the effects it causes in the world) to the brilliance of its prose.76 (This is not, however, to suggest that there is no connection whatsoever.) 75 The subtitle of the first program in The Human Language Series, Discovering the Human Language: Colorless Green Ideas, pays direct homage to perhaps the most over-romanticized moment in Chomsky’s most over-romanticized book: the sentence Colorless green ideas sleep furiously, an oft-repeated example sentence that Chomsky presents early in Syntactic Structures in order to demonstrate that grammar is distinct from meaning (i.e., we can recognized the sentence as grammatical despite being apparently meaningless). Colorless green ideas has spawned the fawning of both linguist and non-linguist alike, and is often presented as evidence of Chomsky’s genius (see, for example, [Barsky 92, figure 10]). However, Carnap presents a similar example sentence early in The Logical Syntax of Language: Pirots karulize elatically (2), a sentence that differs from Chomsky’s sentence only in that the words themselves, although having morphology to indicate what part of speech they are, are meaningless. 76 Indeed, on several occasions in his work on Chomsky, Harris speaks of Chomsky’s genius of exposition in Syntactic Structures. Harris, for example, suggests in “The Chomskyan Revolution I: Syntax, Semantics, and Science” that “Syntactic Structures is, uncategorically, a masterpiece. Oenbring / 77 Although Harris, for certain, offers a more nuanced perspective on Chomsky than the master’s hagiographers, Harris, following Chomsky’s followers, oftentimes speaks of the differences between Chomsky’s theories and the post-Bloomfieldians using simplistic divisions and dichotomies received directly from Chomsky and his followers’ accounts (e.g., Harris suggests the post-Bloomfieldians to have been afflicted by “naïve positivism” [118] and at other points seems very close at points to suggesting that they lacked a theory of syntax [“Argumentation” 123]). (Indeed, Chomsky has worked hard to make sure that his account of the history of generative grammar is disseminated, and, as I acknowledge earlier, it may be difficult for historians of linguistics to avoid Chomsky’s dichotomies.) Now that I have made it quite clear that my goal is not to heap more unnecessary lavish praise upon Syntactic Structures, I must acknowledge that the text has had remarkable and legitimate social effects upon the discipline of linguistics (or at least has become a point of identity for an important school of linguistics). By reading Syntactic Structures rhetorically, I am not claiming that the arguments and textual forms that I analyze are totally unique to the piece. Indeed, an important feature of Chomsky’s project has been his discipline in his rhetorical formulations; he has made the same points over and over again for a certain period of time, in effect, distributing talking points for his followers. Many of the most important issues raised by Syntactic Structures, Chomsky had already raised a year earlier in an even more condensed format in an article Lucid, convincing, syntactically daring, … it spoke directly to the imagination and ambitions of the entire field” (49-50). Oenbring / 78 “Three Models for the Description of Language” in IRE77 Transactions of Information Theory.78 Why Syntactic Structures became more famous than “Three Models” we can never know for certain (the journal “Three Models” was published in? pure historical accident?). Nevertheless, Syntactic Structures, for certain, did cause a not insignificant stir in both linguistics and in related fields at the time of its original publication, leading to seven reviews within two years, including in journals in surrounding disciplines like anthropology, with eight more reviews appearing in the following decade (Koerner and Tajima 7).79 Released by a small publisher in the Netherlands, based off of reorganized lecture notes, using examples only from English, and with the main body of the text totaling only on the order of 100 pages, Syntactic Structures is an unlikely ‘revolutionary’ text. (Of course, this little-book-that-could story has not escaped Chomsky’s hagiographers.) The brevity of the text and the fact that it was based off of lecture notes is, however, of interest from the standpoint of rhetoric; one might speculate that the text’s conciseness and its original non-specialist audience may have played a role in the text’s reception. From a rhetorical perspective, Syntactic Structures can, somewhat arbitrarily, be broken up into six main sections and tasks. First of all, Chomsky attempts to demonstrate the independence of syntax from questions of meaning (this is where the famous sentence 77 Note: I(nstitute) of R(adio) E(ngineers) Also see Chomsky’s broadly-anthologized 1958 conference paper “A Transformational Approach to Syntax.” 79 Several times in this study I turn to the number of reviews a publication spawned as a measure of its effects. This is one of very few purely quantitative empirical measures available to a historian of a discipline, requiring no reliance upon the oftentimes foggy memories of participants. However, one should always keep in mind that when I present numbers of reviews I do not claim that all reviews are exclusively positive or negative. 78 Oenbring / 79 Colorless green ideas sleep furiously comes from). Next Chomsky polemicizes against Markov processes, a way of conceptualizing sentences that, under Chomsky’s reading, is too limited. Then he engages in a similar argument against the limitations of finite phrase structure rules, a way of representing strings of syntax that Chomsky had basically developed himself. Next Chomsky introduces his own version of transformations as a way to resolve some of these problems. After introducing transformations, Chomsky begins a broader methodological conversation that, although indicating for sure that there are implications to his findings, doesn’t claim directly any sort of epistemological revolution (this is where Chomsky introduces a version of what eventually in generative circles would become the dichotomy between discovery procedures and evaluation procedures). Next Chomsky gives several examples of transformations, all based on the English auxiliary verb system. Following the examples, Chomsky engages in another reassessment of the implications of his findings, this time focused on what the methods of syntactic analysis that he offers in the book can offer to analyses of meaning (meaning being an always alluring notion). Finally, Chomsky ends the book with a brief summary of the most important claims of the book, followed by appendices. Although there are many explanations for what makes Syntactic Structures novel (and, indeed, what made Chomsky’s work in this period as a whole novel), Newmeyer, the generative linguist whose work on the history of generative grammar has become the ‘official’ history within the school, seems to hit the nail on the head by suggesting that what distinguished Syntactic Structures is its promotion of a “formal, nonempiricist Oenbring / 80 theory of a human attribute” (Newmeyer 1986: 18).80 Basically, a “formal, nonempiricist theory of a human attribute” means this: that while Chomsky, like Harris, prefers (at least in theory) precise formalism for describing human languages, he, unlike Harris, assumes that the formalism are describing something that is both real and that is based in a human capacity.81 As I have suggested before, one of Chomsky’s most frequent rhetorical strategies is the clean dichotomy. Randy Harris similarly notes that: One of Chomksy’s most consistent eristic techniques is the rhetoric of division. His work — political, linguistic, and philosophical —is peppered with binary divisions. One class of proposals or analyses is “totally irrational” (1981a:33) or “near vacuous” (1981b:19) or “merits no comment among sane people” (1987:81). Another class is “correct and useful” (1979: 181, obvious to the “careful observer” (1988:59) or to anyone “whose concern is for insight and understanding” (1965: 20). (119) Of course, these examples that Harris presents are merely a small fraction of Chomsky’s repertoire of binary divisions. 80 It is, indeed, interesting that I turn toward a Chomsky hagiographer for what I consider perhaps the most definitive definition of Chomsky’s project in Syntactic Structures. One may see this as evidence for how well Chomsky and his followers have controlled the message. That is to say, I still am defining Syntactic Structures based on their terms. 81 However, Newmeyer also seems to read several of features of Chomsky’s project that he had not yet explicitly promoted back onto Syntactic Structures (e.g., the notion of creativity — which is present in Syntactic Structures largely couched in the more mathematical distinction between finite and infinite phrase structure — and Chomsky’s reframing of Saussure’s notion of langue as the notion of competence (Newmeyer 1986: 19). (Indeed, Chomsky did not speak of Saussure’s langue model in print until 1963.) Oenbring / 81 Harris also notes the place that these clean dichotomies play in Syntactic Structures (119). On the first page of the preface of Syntactic Structures, Chomsky builds a divide between “precisely constructed models” and “obscure and intuition-bound notions” (5). Later on, Chomsky distinguishes between a “theory of linguistic structure” and a “manual of helpful procedures” (106). However, Harris also suggests that Chomsky as a whole avoids unnecessarily provocative rhetoric in Syntactic Structures, a suggestion that seems a bit off the mark. Specifically, Harris states that Chomsky avoids “divisive rhetoric” and “establishes a team spirit” (119) That is to say, Harris seems to understate the revolutionary ambitions of the study. Indeed, on the first page of the first chapter of the main body of the text (i.e., just to limit our scope to that page), Chomsky sets up important dichotomies between finite and infinite, grammatical and ungrammatical — in addition to making the bold step of allowing appeals to intuitions of grammaticality (13). Like other places in his work, one of Chomsky’s most important rhetorical techniques in Syntactic Structures is the straw man. After attempting to demonstrate the autonomy of grammar in the first chapter, Chomsky quickly moves to polemicizing against Markov processes, an idea lifted from the fledgling field of information theory, specifically Shannon and Weaver’s highly technical The Mathematical Theory of Communication, a text aimed more at engineers than linguists.82 Basically Chomsky’s problem with Markov processes in Syntactic Structures is that the theory, at least in his construal of it, cannot account for the near infinite number of grammatical sentences that 82 Indeed, Shannon himself at the time worked for Bell Telephone Laboratories. Oenbring / 82 speakers of individual human languages can produce and recognize as well or poorlyformed. Chomsky suggests in the chapter “An Elementary Linguistic Theory,” that “it seems quite clear that no theory of linguistic structure based exclusively on Markov process models and the like will be able to explain or account for the ability of a speaker of English to produce and understand new utterances, while he rejects other new sequences as not belonging to the language” (23). While the notion of Markov Processes had been picked up in Hockett’s 1955 book A Manual of Phonology, Markov processes were by no means a central theory to the discipline of linguistics at the time.83 Indeed, although Hockett only mentions “Markoff Processes” once as part of broad and vague methodological explication (i.e., in his attempt to participate in a broader unification of scientific methods across multiple disciplines [remember that Markov processes is an idea originating in information theory]), Chomsky seems to read Markov Processes as one of the core concepts of Hockett’s book. (It is, indeed, interesting that in his 1957 review of Hockett’s A Manual of Phonology, Chomsky never uses the term Markov Process despite offering an extensive critique of Hockett’s methods.)84 Chomsky’s next step in Syntactic Structures is to unveil — all while critiquing the limitations of — phrase structure rules (which Chomsky presents as, nevertheless, a clear improvement upon Markov processes); Chomsky conflates his own ideas regarding 83 Interestingly, however, probabilistic Markov models have seen a marked increase in their prestige with the rise of computer-based corpus linguistics. 84 Furthermore, one is tempted to question how carefully Chomsky had read Hockett’s and Shannon and Weaver’s texts, seeing that in Syntactic Structures he transliterates the name of the Russian mathematician that Hockett and Shannon and Weaver spell “Markoff” as “Markov.” Oenbring / 83 phrase structure — most clearly developed in his own as-of-yet-unpublished (yet still referenced) Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory — with the post-Bloomfieldian syntactic theory of immediate constituent analysis in order to demonstrate the limitations of phrase structure rules (i.e., his rhetorically-created straw man theory) so that he can introduce the concept of transformations as a resolution to the problems he finds in the phrase structure model. While it is largely unclear who, if anyone, espouses the theory of phrase structure he is critiquing, Chomsky tentatively connects in a footnote the model of phrase structure he presents to Hardwood’s 1955 article in Language “Axiomatic Syntax,” a brief piece that uses neither of the terms phrase structure rules nor immediate constituent analysis. Framing a theory in a way so that it follows in line with the unique problems one finds in one’s own theories so that one can promote yet another theory, yet seemingly placing the blame on other scholars, is, for certain, a straw man form of exposition. Newmeyer, usually a staunch defender of Chomsky, similarly notes the strangeness of Chomsky’s polemicizing against theories that no one really espoused. Avoiding specifically suggesting this to be a strategic or rhetorical maneuver by Chomsky, Newmeyer nevertheless notes that “Chomsky was in the peculiar position of having to argue against two generative grammatical models — finite state grammars and phrase structure grammars — which had very few outspoken adherents” (1986: 22). As part of his introduction to the notion of phrase structure in this section of Structures, Chomsky presents a first elegantly simple set of rules (see 13) and an example Oenbring / 84 of a simple derivation (i.e., a list presenting the ordered steps involved in the development of a string of syntax) (see 14). (13) (i) Sentence → NP + VP (ii) NP→ T + N (iii) VP → Verb + NP (iv) T → the (v) N → man, ball, etc. (vi) Verb → hit, took, etc. (Syntactic Structures 26) (14) Sentence NP + VP (i) [rule number] T + N+ VP (ii) T + N + Verb + NP (iii) the + N + Verb + NP (iv) the + man + Verb + NP (v) the + man + hit + NP (vi) the + man + hit + T + N (ii) the + man + hit + the + N (iv) the + man + hit + the + ball (v) (Syntactic Structures 27) In addition to these elegantly simple rule sets and derivations, Chomsky at this point in Syntactic Structures also presents a first simple and rudimentary tree diagram. Oenbring / 85 Chomsky further develops his system of rewrite rules, turning quickly toward critiquing the limitations of such phrase structure. Using examples exclusively from the English auxiliary system (i.e., ‘helper’ verbs like have, be, and do), Chomsky suggests that we can increase the elegance and the simplicity of the system by allowing items to move from the positions in which they are placed by phrase structure rules. Chomsky gives the following example of the derivation of a simple indicative mood, active voice sentence in present perfect progressive,85 a sentence thus requiring a form of the verb to be and a form of the verb to have: (30) the + man + Verb + the + book from (13i-v) the + man + Aux + V + the + book (28i) the + man + Aux + read + the + book (28ii) the + man + C + have + en + be + ing + read + the +book (28iii) – we select the elements C, have + en, and be + ing the + man + S + have + en + be + ing + read + the + book 85 (29i) Although I use terminology from traditional grammar for my explanation, Chomsky largely avoids such terms. Oenbring / 86 the + man + have + S # be + en + read + ing # the + book (29ii) [*3] # the # man # have + S # be + en + # read + ing # the # book # (29iii) The morphophonemic rules (19), etc. will convert the last line of this derivation into: (31) the man has been reading the book (Syntactic Structures 39-40) The presence of the verb to be as an auxiliary verb in an active voice sentence indicates that the sentence is progressive and necessitates the addition of an ing ending to the main verb (e.g., he was running, she is dancing, I shall be walking). Similarly, the presence of the verb to have as an auxiliary verb requires that the next verb, be it an auxiliary or a main verb, must add past participle morphology (e.g, I had walked, she had been running, he has run). As these bits of morphology appear semantically related to the auxiliary verbs, the system may appear to become more elegant by suggesting that these bits of morphology are first placed next to their auxiliary verbs by the phrase structure rules (see rule 29i above) and then move to the next element on the right (see rule 29ii).86 Chomsky rationalizes the addition of such rules suggesting the existence of a deeper-than-surfacelevel formal unity to syntactic constructions by appeals to simplicity. Specifically, Chomsky suggests that “we see that significant simplification is possible if we are permitted to formulate rules of a more complex type” (41). Although these so-called 86 Newmeyer explains the affix-hopping analyses of Syntactic Structures in the following, typically elegant, manner: “The Syntactic Structures analysis … treated the superficially discontinuous auxiliary morphemes have … en and be … ing as unit constituents generated by the phrase structure rules and posited a simple transformational rule to permute the affixal and verbal elements to their surface positions, thus predicting the basic distribution of auxiliaries in simple declarative sentences” (24). Oenbring / 87 affix-hopping examples may seem overly elaborate, even byzantine, to some, they are for certain some the most elegant specific analyses of specific constructions that Chomsky has ever offered in print. Indeed, many have suggested the affix-hopping examples from Syntactic Structures to be the most convincing examples Chomsky has ever presented in print.87 I, for one, am not afraid to say that I find them somewhat alluring. After extending his analysis of affix-hopping to include the formation of passive voice,88 Chomsky gives a name to these new but different types of phrase structure rules that he presents. He calls them grammatical transformations (44). While Chomsky does cite Zellig Harris’ 1957 article in Language “Cooccurence and Transformations in Linguistic Structure” deep in a footnote on the same page as he introduces his version of transformations, Chomsky seems to overstate the novelty of his proposition; he seems to take all the credit for the development of the notion of transformations. Specifically, Chomsky suggests that “if we examine carefully the implications of these supplementary rules, however, we see that they lead to an entirely new conception of linguistic structure. Let us call each such rule a ‘grammatical transformation’” (44, emphasis added). One of few bold novelty claims in the book, Chomsky directly suggests his version of transformations to be something entirely new. Newmeyer notes that “the ingenuity of [Chomsky’s affix-hopping] analysis probably did more to win supporters for Chomsky than all of his metatheortical statements about discovery and evaluation procedures and immediately led to some linguists proposing generativetransformational analyses of particular phenomena despite a lack of enthusiasm for the foundations of the theory itself” (1980 [1986:24]). 88 Active voice: Sue hit the ball. Passive voice: The ball was hit by Sue. 87 Oenbring / 88 Chomsky continues with a meta-methodological chapter titled “On the Goals of Linguistic Theory.” In this chapter introduces an early version of what would become the dichotomy between evaluation procedures and discovery procedures.89 Chomsky suggests specifically that: It is no doubt possible to give an organized account of many useful procedures of analysis, but it is questionable whether these can be formulated rigorously, exhaustively and simply enough to qualify as a practical and mechanical discovery procedure. At any rate, this problem is not within the scope of our investigations here. Our ultimate aim is provide an objective, non-intuitive way to evaluate a grammar once presented, and to compare it with other proposed grammars. (Syntactic Structures 56, emphasis added) While Chomsky avoids using the term evaluation procedure directly in this quote, he does use the term on the next page (57). This dichotomy became much clearer in later historical accounts of Chomsky’s work.90 By discovery procedure, Chomsky means the rigorously applied methods for analyzing a corpus promoted in the work of Harris and other post-Bloomfieldians. In contrast, Chomsky suggests that linguists should “lower their aims” (57) to the development of evaluation procedures; as all one can ever do is offer theories of language and/or syntactic structures, in practice all one can ever do is evaluate theories of 89 Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew speaks of the notion of discovery procedures, but it hadn’t, of course, been published yet. 90 Indeed, Newmeyer (1980, 1986) draws the dichotomy clearly. The dichotomy is also drawn clearly in a leading question the interview transcripts presented in 1979’s Language and Responsibility (114) with Chomsky responding in turn. Oenbring / 89 language and/or syntax, theories that are arrived at by “intuition, guess-work, all sorts of partial methodological hints, reliance on past experience” (56). (It is indeed, interesting that the term discovery procedure, a term that has become common for others to use when describing Harris’ methods, a concept that Chomsky has used consistently to distinguish between his methods and Harris’, was not, in fact, a term that Harris used, but was in fact first published in Syntactic Structures. The fact that it has become difficult for some to speak of Harris’ work without invoking the concept of discovery procedure [i.e., that Chomsky has defined discourse regarding Harris project] is also quite interesting.) While Chomsky’s notion of a discovery procedure calls to mind propositions made in Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery91 (specifically the notion of antiinductivism), never in the text does Chomsky actually cite Popper. Similarly, although Chomsky does cite Goodman and Quine in Syntactic Structures, they do not form the backbone of any of Chomsky’s core propositions. However, the findings of philosophers of science, correctly or erroneously interpreted, have, nevertheless, played an important role in Chomsky’s followers’ discourse surrounding Syntactic Structures; Chomsky’s followers have used notions from philosophy of science in order to frame Syntactic Structures as a text instigating and participating in a ‘scientific revolution’.92 Accordingly, Chomsky and his followers have routinely enlisted the support of 91 While the title of the English translation The Logic of Scientific Discovery certainly calls to mind Chomsky’s “discovery procedures,” we should remember that the English translation did not appear until 1959. The title of the original 1934 German version Logik der Forschung does not suggest the notion of discovery, translating directly as “The Logic of Research.” 92 Harlow’s largely balanced account of the history of generative grammar “Evolution of Transformational Grammar” in Koerner and Asher’s Concise History of the Language Sciences, for example, suggests one of the central tenets of generative grammar to be its “hypotheticodeductive” methodology. Oenbring / 90 philosophy of science (or at least the appearance of the support of philosophy of science93) in order to build rhetorical wedges between their work and the work of the post-Bloomfieldians.94 After a chapter providing more examples of transformations, all from the English auxiliary transformation, Chomsky moves on to a discussion of the place of questions of meaning in linguistic analyses in the chapter “Syntax and Semantics.” Although Chomsky does work at the end of the study to make foggy the boundaries between syntax and semantics, as a whole, Chomsky’s concerns at the end of the book seem to accord with the state of the discipline at the time. Indeed, while Chomsky’s concluding summary of many of the most important assertions of the text does leave the text ending with a statement of novelty, the end of Syntactic Structures avoids bold proclamations of a scientific revolution. Rather, at the end of Syntactic Structures Chomsky works to reassert the text’s relevance within contemporary discussions in linguistics. It was not long, however, before a bold proclamation of the revolutionary nature of Syntactic Structures would appear in print. In fact, the first suggestion of the radically new nature of Chomsky's work took place in a 1957 review of Syntactic Structures written by one of Chomsky's very own graduate students, Robert Lees. Lees makes it clear from the beginning of his infamously-glowing review that Chomsky’s “little book on syntactic structure has much to say about the status of linguistics as a science” (375). Recall that Chomsky and his followers invoke the support of Quine’s “Two Dogma’s of Empiricism” as support for the nascent rationalism in Chomsky’s work. 94 Elsewhere, however, Chomsky does speak of Popper’s work as support for the notion of evaluation procedures (see, for example, 1964: 98]). 93 Oenbring / 91 Attempting to build a wedge between Chomsky’s work and the post-Bloomfieldians, Lees suggests that: Chomsky’s book on syntactic structures is one of the first serious attempts on the part of the linguists to construct within the tradition of scientific theoryconstruction a comprehensive theory of language which may be understood in the same sense that a chemical, biological theory is ordinarily understood by experts in those fields. It is not a mere reorganization of the data into a new kind of library catalogue, nor another speculative philosophy about the nature of Man and Language, but rather a rigorous explication of our intuitions about our language in terms of an overt axiom system, the theorems derivable from it, explicit results which may be compared with new data and other intuitions, all based plainly on an overt theory of the internal structure of language (377) The loaded nature of this language hardly needs to be pointed out. Lees hyperbolically suggests Chomsky’s work to constitute the “first serious attempt” to build a theory of language “within the tradition of scientific theory-construction.” (Indeed, Randy Harris, like others, has called Lees ‘Chomsky’s Huxley’ [171]). Invoking the stamp-collector aspersion often used in debates between different would-be groups of scientists,95 Lees takes a direct shot at those linguists who believe that their task is to describe languages in an empirically scrupulous way, suggesting Chomsky’s work (unlike theirs) consists of more than “a mere reorganization of the data into a kind of library catalogue.” See, for example, Ceccarelli’s chronicle of the debates between naturalists and geneticists in Shaping Science with Rhetoric (18). 95 Oenbring / 92 Since Bloomfield’s “A Set of Postulates,” many American linguists had been envious of explicitly formulated axiomatic systems. While metatheorizing about axiomatic systems does not play a substantial role in Chomsky’s book, Lees seems to read this element into Syntactic Structures; he takes Chomsky’s phrase structure rules as themselves precisely-formed theories of language: axioms that can be supported by empirical evidence or discarded. Hence, Lees suggests that Chomsky’s system allows for a “rigorous explication of our intuitions about our language in terms of an overt axiom system, the theorems derivable from it, explicit results which may be compared with new data.” As I have suggested, whether or not Chomsky actually espoused mentalist beliefs in the 1950s, he was reticent, given the state of the discipline of linguistics, to immediately come out of the closet as a mentalist (he and his followers have, nevertheless, routinely read the mentalism of the sixties back onto his work of the fifties).96 Similarly, while Chomsky isn’t afraid to bring to the front in Syntactic Structures some of what would become the important distinguishing features of the program of generative grammar, he avoids extensive explanation of the more contentious methodological issues separating his work from the post-Bloomfieldians. Lees’ review, however, faces many of the most contentious methods undergirding generative grammar head on (e.g., appeals to intuition). This elaborate unveiling procedure has been labeled by some as a “good-cop-bad-cop ploy” (see Harris 1994). Chomsky played the role of Chomsky suggests in the introduction to LSLT that “in LSLT the ‘psychological analogue’ to the methodological of constructing linguistic theories is not discussed, but it lay in the immediate background of my own thinking. To raise the issue seemed to me, at the time, too audacious” (LSLT 35). 96 Oenbring / 93 Darwin-Master, and Lees played the role of Huxley-Bulldog. And they both played their roles well. Rhetoric and the Beginnings of Disciplinary Formation As I am beginning to demonstrate, despite his hagiography (e.g., Lyons’, Otero’s, Newmeyer’s, and Barsky’s accounts), Chomsky did not come down from the mountains á là Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and begin making his bold proclamations about syntax, the nature of language, and biology. Rather, he, like all successful academic rhetors, has had to negotiate the prevailing regimes of knowledge in order to build space for his research program. As I have demonstrated, at the beginnings of generative grammar, Chomsky looked outside linguistics proper to formal symbolic logic for a set of methods to ground his concerns in the study of language; early in the development of generative grammar, Chomsky looked to formal symbolic logic for footholds in practical methods, methods that when applied to the study of human language proper led to the formation of a protean distinct intellectual community: a distinct discipline. That is to say, Chomsky worked to craft distinct formal methods for the study of syntax before he engaged in his later, bolder attempts to shift the disciplinary identity of linguistics. (Indeed, compared to the byzantine constructions common in later generative grammar the analyses in early works such as Syntactic Structures look quite quaint.) Oenbring / 94 What’s more, by claiming the banner of notions (like formalism and rigor 97) lifted from formal symbolic logic bearing scientific cachet during the mid-20th century, Chomsky was attempting to build the scientific ethos of the new tradition of scholarship he was developing. (Recall Chomsky’s largely bogus claims to be working within the constructive nominalist tradition.98) As I have shown in this chapter, several of the most important binaries that have been in contention in battles over the identity of scientific linguistics (e.g., mentalism vs. anti-mentalism, and empiricism vs. intuitionism and/or rationalism), actually predate Chomsky’s work. Chomsky’s work has been ‘revolutionary’ in that he successfully flipped these pre-existing binaries, moving, as I will show, the identity of ‘scientific’ linguistics from anti-mentalism to mentalism and from empiricism to intuitionism and rationalism. Early in the formation of generative grammar, this identity work was done not by Chomsky himself, but by his bulldogs like Lees. Nonetheless, as early as Syntactic Structures Chomsky offered his own identity binaries (e.g., the dichotomy between discovery procedure and evaluation procedure), identity binaries that have been invoked persistently by his followers to define Chomsky’s project as science and other linguistics as non-science. (The flipping of these binaries does, however, little to Formalism and rigor are, I argue, what rhetorician Burke calls god-terms (see Burke’s The Rhetoric of Religion): vaguely-defined, grand notions that to which others are expected to pay deference (e.g., freedom). 98 Playing on linguists’ science envy of other fields is, however, a technique that Chomsky and his followers continue to use to this day. Indeed, Chomsky has routinely defined generative grammar through appeals to psychology and biology (Chomsky has famously argued that linguistics should properly be viewed as branch of cognitive psychology), despite the fact that he has often disparaged the psychological establishment and has rarely, if ever, incorporated genuine data from psychology and biology. 97 Oenbring / 95 nothing, I argue, to change the accuracy or value of linguists’ analyses of human languages.) As I have shown in this chapter, Chomsky has done much to define his theories of in opposition to other theories of human language (most often the post-Bloomfieldians and in particular his mentor Zellig Harris). In practice, one of Chomsky’s most common methods is to set up others work in a way so that others’ methods seem uninspired, dull, homogenous, and in error: Chomsky and his followers practice straw man argumentation. Recall Chomsky’s skewering of phrase structure rules and Markov processes in Syntactic Structures. As I hope to have shown, the young Chomsky, while for certain bold and innovative, had to display deference to established regimes of knowledge much more than we will see in the later Chomsky; the young Chomsky was certainly more cautious and less willing to make claims based on his authority (which is understandable seeing that he didn’t have authority yet) than we will see in Chomsky the pan-academic Master. Indeed, the most confrontational and boldest rhetorical maneuvers that Chomsky and his followers engaged in their coup and subsequent sub-revolutions in linguistic theory have yet to come in our story; the foundry of conflict in which Chomsky and his followers forged the identity of generative grammar, and by extension later ‘scientific’ linguistics, is still, in our story, heating up. Oenbring / 96 Chapter 3: Rhetorical Revolutions and Disciplinary Identity: From Current Issues to Principles and Parameters Introduction As I have argued, although Chomsky’s work in the Syntactic Structures period was quite different from the post-Bloomfieldian establishment, and was very creative, it did not attack the core of the disciplinary identity of linguistics at the time; Chomsky had in the 1950s not yet attempted to craft a unique disciplinary identity for generative grammar and linguistics as a whole.99 Nor did Chomsky and his followers engage in the fifties in extensive boundary work: critiquing other programs of scholarship, attempting to write these other programs as outside of the bounds of ‘scientific’ linguistics. Since establishing his methodological foothold in the 1950s, Chomsky’s scholarship has, I argue, been as much about managing how the field of linguistics as a whole thinks about itself than it has been about promoting novel methods for analyzing language. Indeed, since the mid-sixties Chomsky has left the most important and unique methodological assumptions of generative grammar largely unchanged: that the possible syntactic constructions of human languages are highly constrained by the human genetic 99 The fact that Chomsky avoided articulating some of the boldest elements of the program of generative grammar in early days has not escaped the attention of historians of linguistics. Newmeyer, for example, has suggested that Chomsky avoided openly speaking of the patterns he was uncovering as universals (i.e., something encoded by the potentials of biology) in the early days of generative grammar in order to avoid drawing the ire of the post-Bloomfieldians. Newmeyer notes that: While [Chomsky] left no room for doubt in [Syntactic Structures] that the general form of linguistics rules and the vocabulary of the theory itself were universal, he was not actually to use the term 'universal' until around 1962. One can only speculate that the atmosphere of the 1950s, suspicious of any but 'inductive' generalizations, made him discrete enough to avoid that emotionally charged term. (1986: 72) Oenbring / 97 endowment; that the linguist’s task is to develop a set of formal axioms that would predict the well-formed syntactic constructions of human languages; and that inquiry can and should rely primarily upon native speakers’ intuitions of well-formedness for evidence. That is to say, the various changes in the model of generative grammar that Chomsky has promoted since the original revolution have been more changes in the rhetorical framework used to legitimate the program to the linguistic and broader academic community than substantive changes in core methodological commitments. (Nonetheless, Chomsky and his followers have done their best to frame each of the changes to the model of generative grammar that Chomsky has supported as deeply profound and insightful.) Another way to say this is that Chomsky’s primary target has, since the 1960s, been more the disciplinary identity of linguistics rather than the actual method used by linguists in their descriptions of languages. These shifts in disciplinary identity have been important to Chomsky in that they have allowed him to frame the various programs he has supported as distinct from (and mutually exclusive of) the programs of other groups of scholars. Accordingly, by controlling the core claims and organizing theses of linguistic inquiry, Chomsky has been able to write his opponents out of the current research paradigm all while reinforcing his own authority. Chomsky’s prerogative to move the field according to his intuitions has been supported by the revolutionary ideology of the field of generative grammar — the field’s self-understanding being caught up with the fact that it triumphed over the bankrupt ancien régime of behaviorist Oenbring / 98 post-Bloomfieldians — with Chomsky, himself the most famous radical public intellectual of the past few decades, playing the role of Comandante. Accordingly, in this chapter I analyze specifically how Chomsky has rhetorically constructed both the original revolution in the disciplinary identity of linguistics and how he constructed his subsequent sub-revolutions; in this chapter I analyze the specific rhetorical maneuvers that Chomsky and his followers have engaged in order to catalyze the original mid-sixties shift in identity of linguistics and the subsequent sub-revolutions he has led the field through, following Chomsky to the Aspects Program (a.k.a. the ‘standard theory’) of the late mid to late sixties, to the Extended Standard Theory of the seventies, to the Principles and Parameters approach of the eighties. (Recall that my goal in this study is to uncover general principles in Chomksy’s rhetoric by surveying the strategies he has used over the course of his career.) As I demonstrate in this chapter, starting with his original shift in the disciplinary identity of linguistics in the mid-sixties, Chomsky has become increasingly bold in moving the field according to his own intuitions; he has become increasingly confident to play his revolution cards. The Rhetoric of Mentalism and Disciplinary Identity As I have noted, Chomsky in the fifties largely avoided most of what would be the boldest claims of the program of generative grammar. Early in the sixties, however, this began to change. For one, Chomsky began openly to espouse linguistic Oenbring / 99 mentalism100: the idea that the study of language tells us something about the inner workings of the mind and that scholarship can and should be grounded in appeals to existence of these structures in the mind. That is to say, Chomsky began to articulate clear large-picture methodological assumptions for the program of generative grammar distinctly opposed to the ruling post-Bloomfieldian establishment. In engaging in these moves Chomsky partook in rhetorical world creation: the attempt to authorize a field of study as a distinct and uniquely valuable mode of inquiry by reference to large-scale methodological and philosophical issues. Chomsky’s 1964 book Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, a text that began its life as Chomsky’s plenary speech at the Ninth International Congress of Linguists in 1962 entitled “The Logical Basis of Linguistic Theory”101 demonstrates these world creation appeals nicely.102 Although much of the text is technical and specific in focus, Chomsky devotes much of the early pages of the text to large scale methodological issues. As he does in several of his most important texts of the 1960s, including 1965’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, the text usually understood as the foundational document of mid-sixties generative methodology, Chomsky devotes much of the early pages of Current Issues to articulating the large picture philosophical and methodological issues However, Chomsky avoided specifically using the term mentalism until 1965’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. 101 Although “The Logical Basis” has been published independently, for the purposes of simplicity I take my examples exclusively from Current Issues. 102 While interpretations range regarding whether Chomsky’s being offered a plenary speech at the 1962 conference (when he was only thirty-three years old) was merely historical coincidence or part of an engineered palace coup with Harris’ help, it is clear that he used the moment in a rhetorically astute manner. 100 Oenbring / 100 undergirding generative grammar as a body of scholarship. That is to say, he was attempting to articulate a new mentalist disciplinary identity for linguistic scholarship. Consider the following passage from the first page of the first chapter of Current Issues, “Goals of Linguistic Theory”: The central fact to which any significant linguistic theory must address itself is this: a mature speaker can produce a new sentence of his language on the appropriate occasion, and other speakers can understand it immediately, though it is equally new to them. Most of our linguistic experience, both as speakers and hearers, is with new sentences; once we have mastered a language the class of sentences which we can operate fluently and without difficulty or hesitation is so vast that for all practical purposes (and, obviously, for all theoretical purposes), we may regard them as infinite. (7) In this passage Chomsky articulates the stakes clearly. A “significant linguistic theory” must be able to account for our unique ability to make creative utterances and our ability to distinguish between well-formed and poorly formed sentences — abilities that are ultimately the product of human biology. Chomsky has over the years made accounting for what he has called the creative aspect of language (8), an ability that is grounded in human biology, a central element of the disciplinary identity of generative grammar. 103 103 While Prague school phonological theorists (a group largely opposed to the postBloomfieldians) clearly expressed an interest in both notions of universals and seeing language as constrained by human nature well before Chomsky’s ‘revolutionary’ mentalism (see, for example, Jakobson’s Child Language, Aphasia, and Phonological Universals and Jakobson and Halle’s Fundamentals of Language), Chomsky only infrequently connect his interest in universals to the Prague school in his 1960s work. Instead, Chomsky traces Western interest in notions of language universals back to pre-Bloomfieldian precursors. Chomsky’s rhetorical purpose in invoking these pre-Bloomfieldian precursors is clear: to craft a clear and distinct disciplinary Oenbring / 101 Since Bloomfield, many American linguists had authorized linguistics as an autonomous field of study on the basis of its focus on a disembodied structured system of relationships. By espousing mentalist beliefs, Chomsky was directly attacking the then established disciplinary identity of linguistics: to describe human languages without positing the existence of structures in the mind.104 Furthermore, by setting up two of the post-Bloomfieldians’ core notions constituting their disciplinary identity (specifically, anti-mentalism and empiricism) as much more radical and problematic commitments than they really were in the day-to-day work of the post-Bloomfieldians linguists (i.e., by straw manning the post-Bloomfieldians), Chomsky could collapse the established disciplinary identity and core assumptions of linguistics and build his own system of order in its place (something which, of course, didn’t happen overnight). What’s more, by foregrounding the (somewhat trivial) fact of the biological nature of human language, and making the obviously alluring claim that linguistics could now provide true insight into the architecture of the human mind, Chomsky’s theories and his name could become a rallying point for a whole generation of linguists desiring to participate in a scientific revolution. Of course, it is impossible to put an exact date on when Chomsky and his followers finally stormed the Bastille and took over the reins of power within the field. identity for generative linguistics, and by extension linguistics as a whole. That is to say, he was building the appearance that generative grammar was something totally distinct from traditional mainstream post-Bloomfieldian linguistics. 104 This is not, of course, to say that Chomsky was the first linguist to focus on the biological foundations of human language. Jakobson and Halle certainly both looked to biology to ground their theories, but their domain of focus was largely phonology and not the more provocative realms of syntax and semantics that Chomsky entered into. Oenbring / 102 Nonetheless, the publication of Current Issues seems as good of a landmark as any other one might propose. While the community of generative grammarians at the time was still located mostly in Cambridge, 105 Current Issues marks a shift in Chomsky’s governing rhetorical strategies; we can say that in Current Issues Chomsky moves from playing by the post-Bloomfieldians’ rules to being the referee of the game (in addition to an all star player). Indeed, the mentalist ideology first presented in Current Issues remains a core claim in generative grammar up to the present. 106 Early Generative Phonology and Boundary Work As several historians of linguistics have suggested, the post-Bloomfieldians did not respond strongly to Chomsky’s propositions in the Syntactic Structures period because Chomsky had not yet attacked the post-Bloomfieldian’s core theory constituting their disciplinary identity (that being phonology). When Chomsky did attack postBloomfieldian phonology, the earlier generation did react strongly. (The most famous example of this is Householder [1965]. Also see Chomsky and Halle’s reply [1965].) Newmeyer notes that: Newmeyer estimates that in 1965, “the faculty and students at MIT … made up at least 90% of the transformational grammarians in the world at the time” (1986: 82). 106 Indeed, while it is debatable whether generative grammar, even after decades of work, has provided genuine insight into the architecture of the human mind that other ways of studying syntax have not, Chomsky has, nevertheless, done an unquestionably good job of attaching mentalism to the disciplinary identity, the brand, of generative grammar, an identity that has spread throughout the discipline of linguistics. It seems to matter little whether there is convincing evidence or not that generative grammar’s mode of inquiry actually has provided access to structures in the mind; what is more important is generative grammarians continued belief that what they are describing is actually something real. 105 Oenbring / 103 a reason that the post-Bloomfiedian rebuttal was delayed comes from the fact that the generativists turned their full attention to phonology only several years after the publication of Syntactic Structures. Since the post-Bloomfieldians never had much to say about syntax, they felt no immediate threat from a new approach to that aspect of grammar. But they reacted with horror to Halle’s and Chomsky’s assaults on their approach to phonology. (Newmeyer 39) While Newmeyer is correct to suggest that the phonology was a more central concern to the post-Bloomfieldians than syntax ever was, he is being somewhat disingenuous to suggest that the earlier school “never had much to say about syntax” (cf. Anderson [316]).107 Nevertheless, Chomsky and his followers (most notably Halle) did in the sixties promote what they claimed to be a distinct brand of phonology, a program that appears to be largely antithetical to post-Bloomfieldian theories: generative phonology. Although Chomsky did not flesh out all of the boldest implications of his new generative phonology until his 1968 book with Halle The Sound Pattern of English, his first publication to tackle issues of phonology came much earlier than that. In fact, Chomsky’s first foray into the field of phonology was a 1956 joint publication with Halle and Lukoff in a festschrift For Roman Jakobson “On Accent and Juncture in English.” Broadly stated, the goal of “On Accent and Juncture” is to reduce the vocabulary for marking stress down to a simple accented-unaccented binary of marking (65). In its focus 107 That is to say, it is in his best interest as a generative grammarian to suggest syntax to be something uniquely Chomskyan (thereby authorizing the exclusion of post-Bloomfieldian linguistics as it is trivial and limited). Indeed, post-Bloomfiedians such as Fries had given substantial treatment of syntax well before Chomsky (see, for example, Fries [1952]). Oenbring / 104 on reducing the linguist’s methodological apparatus to the smallest toolkit possible, “On Accent and Juncture” reflects concerns that would occupy Chomsky throughout his career, a concern borrowed from the Prague school linguists like Jakobson. (As Anderson notes “both universals and explanatory principles were considered by American structuralists to be either non-existent or beyond the scope of possible research … This was directly contrary to European practice — which was generally stigmatized in America as vague and impressionistic” [324].) Although Newmeyer reads “On Accent and Juncture” as a bullet through the heart of the post-Bloomfieldian proscription against mixing levels108 (33), the tone of “On Accent” is not particularly polemical; Newmeyer reads more of Chomsky’s mature generative phonology into the piece than is actually present. (As I have suggested, the clean break is an important element of Chomsky and his follower’s revolutionary historiography of generative grammar.) Despite the obvious influence of the Prague school, “On Accent and Juncture” presents itself as a development of post-Bloomfieldian phonology rather than a movement beyond it (see, for example, [65]).109 Chomsky’s first solo publication in which he deals substantially with issues of phonology is Current Issues. One of the primary rhetorical functions of Current Issues is 108 Recall that I have suggested that Chomsky and Newmeyer have placed emphasis on the postBloomfieldian proscription against mixing levels largely as a technique to tell a coherent story of an empistemological rupture. Newmeyer’s emphasis in (1980 [1986]) on the place of the biuniqueness condition in post-Bloomfieldian phonology also comes directly from Chomsky (see, for example, [1964: 80-81). 109 In later work, however, generativists would make it clear that their new phonology was part of a new program totally distinct from post-Bloomfieldian phonology. Halle’s 1962 article “Phonology in Generative Grammar” makes it clear by its very title that generative grammar has clear implications for the study of phonology; he makes it clear that there is a new phonology that accompanies the program of generative grammar. Oenbring / 105 to draw a neat dividing line between generative grammar and post-Bloomfieldian linguistics. Early in the work, for example, Chomsky neatly divides between “the taxonomic model — which is an outgrowth of modern structuralist linguistics” (11) and generative grammar, which he associates with tradition (specifically, interestingly, traditional grammar). Speaking at length regarding phonology in two separate sections in the study, Chomsky’s first run through in the chapter “Levels of Success for Grammatical Description” uses a simple example to demonstrate that an explicitly formulated theory of linguistic structure is much more interesting than an accurate account of empirical facts in and of itself. In “Levels” Chomsky first formulates his famous divide between three levels of adequacy, a schema that would later be used to drive a wedge between his theories the work of the post-Bloomfieldians. These levels are: observational adequacy (accounting for the ‘raw facts’ of language in a corpus), descriptive adequacy (having a model that accurately describes native speakers’ intuitions of the well-formedness), and explanatory adequacy (having a model that can account for and provide an explanation for native speakers’ intuitions of well-formedness). Associating the post-Bloomfieldians with the level of observational adequacy (29), Chomsky’s uses the example of accidental gaps in the lexicon to develop the schema. Chomsky explains: A few linguistic examples may help to clarify the distinction between these various levels of adequacy. Consider first the case of so-called “accidental gaps” in the lexicon. Thus in English there is a word “pick” /pik/, but no /blick/ or /ftik/. Oenbring / 106 The level of observational adequacy would be attained by a grammar that contained the rule N → /pik/, but no lexical rule introducing /blik/ or /flik/. To attain the level of descriptive adequacy, a grammar would have to provide, in addition, a general rule that sets up a specific barrier against /ftik/, but not against /blik/ (which would thus qualify as an accidental gap, a phonologically permissible nonsense syllable). This level would be achieved by a grammar that contained the generalization that in initial position before a true consonant (a segment which is consonantal and non-vocalic, in terms of Jakobson’s distinctive features), a consonant is necessarily /s/. The level of explanatory adequacy would be attained by a linguistic theory that provides a principled reason for incorporating this generalization in a grammar of English and for excluding (the factually correct) “rule” that in the context #b-ik a liquid is necessarily /r/. (3031). The crux of Chomsky’s argument here has to do with the distribution of /blik/ and /ftik/ in English. Although neither /blik/ nor /ftik/ exists in English, we, as native speakers, know intuitively that the former, unlike the latter, it is phonologically possible in English. We can account for the fact that /ftik/ is impossible with a simple rule: “that in initial position before a true consonant (a segment which is consonantal and non-vocalic, in terms of Jakobson’s distinctive features), a consonant is necessarily /s/.” (/stik/ is acceptable, but /ftik/ isn’t.) However, a similar rule for /blik/ “that in the context #b-ik a liquid is necessarily /r/” would go against our intuitions of possible English phonological Oenbring / 107 patterns (i.e., we know intuitively as speakers of English that although /brik/ actually exists in English and /blik/ does not, /blik/ would still be acceptable phonologically). In this simple example, Chomsky makes a convincing case that an explanatory rule that offers a theory of language focusing on general principles (e.g., the levels of descriptive adequacy and explanatory adequacy) is more interesting, and, indeed, useful than the mere empirical facts of language (observational adequacy) (i.e., an empiricallyfocused account would not be able to distinguish between /blik/ and /ftik/ because neither occur in corpora of English). Rhetorically, the function of the levels of adequacy schema — a function to which Chomsky later frequently put the schema to use — is to authorize the search for abstractly formulated principles with the linguist relying upon appeals to intuition, rather than a corpus, for evidence. While Chomsky’s first run through of issues of phonology in Current Issues is short and says relatively little about the bases of post-Bloomfieldian phonology (its rhetorical purpose being to provide evidence for Chomsky’s different levels of adequacy model — which Chomsky then applies to an analysis of syntax), Chomsky, however, returns to phonology in the latter pages of Current Issues in the chapter “The Nature of Structural Descriptions,” this time engaging in an extended dissection of the bases of post-Bloomfieldian phonology; later in the study, Chomsky offers an extended critical analysis of what he takes to be the most important elements of post-Bloomfieldian phonology, and by extension the entire program of post-Bloomfieldian linguistics. Like elsewhere, the dominant rhetorical technique Chomsky deploys in his analysis of post-Bloomfieldian phonology is straw man argumentation; Chomsky sets up Oenbring / 108 post-Bloomfieldian phonological theories in such a way that it can easily be framed as unenlightening. Chomsky starts off analyzing a set of theories that he refers to as systematic phonemics, a group of theories he associates with Bloomfield’s work despite conceding that what he is picking apart is largely an idealization. Chomsky states that “systematic phonemics seems to be, in essence, the phonemics of Bloomfield’s practice (1933) (in particular, when his secondary phonemes are not represented), though it is difficult to say whether it is in accord with his phonological theory, which is hardly a model of clarity” (69). Chomsky later rebrands his object of assault taxonomic phonemics. Reaffirming that what he is critiquing is largely a straw man, Chomsky notes that: “abstracting away from much variation, let us coin the term ‘taxonomic phonemics’ to refer to this body of doctrine, thus emphasizing its striking reliance, in almost all version, on procedures of segmentation and classification (identification of variants)” (75). As this quote suggests, Chomsky frames the post-Bloomfieldians procedures as mechanical and unenlightening: taxonomic. Taxonomic phonemics, clearly meant to be a pejorative term, is not, however, the only negative label designed to create a straw man that Chomsky applies to postBloomfieldian methodology. In fact, of the five pillars of post-Bloomfieldian phonemics that Chomsky speaks of (linearity, invariance, biuniqueness, and local determinacy), only one of them appears to have been used in post-Bloomfieldian work, with the rest being terms coined by Chomsky.110 110 Derwing notes that: Though he admits that ‘modern phonologists have not achieved anything like unanimity’, he insists that a ‘body of doctrine has emerged to all or part of which a great many Oenbring / 109 With post-Bloomfieldian empirically-focused phonology apparently refuted, Chomsky makes it clear that the only way out of the methodological conundrum is to make a turn toward a more abstract phonological system. Chomsky suggests that “for the present, it seems that the most promising way to give a closer specification of this level of representation and the criteria that determine it is by refining the abstract conditions on the form of generative grammar, the measure of evaluation and the universal features that define the phonetic matrices in terms of which the primary data is represented” (96). As post-Bloomfieldian phonology is unenlightening, what is needed is bold universalizing system, a system that, for the moment, will have to be abstract. Notice that Chomsky invokes the notion of measure of evaluation (recall evaluation procedures) as support for his claim. The notion of measure of evaluation became a key notion undergirding generative phonology. As we cannot study all features in all languages at once, and not all relevant features of language are available in corpora, we have to assess phonological theories based on their seeming elegance based on limited evidence, all while allowing appeals to intuition. While Chomsky does not flesh out or offer such a system in Current Isssues, he, nevertheless, creates a space and need for such a system, a system that would be expressed in his (in)famous 1968 book with Halle The Sound Pattern of English. [structural] linguists would subscribe’ (1964, p. 91). To refer to this body of doctrine (‘abstracting away from much variation’), Chomsky coins the term ‘taxonomic phonemics’ (p. 91), which he defines as that version of classical phonemic theory which subscribes to the following five conditions: (1) ‘phonemic specifiability’, (2) ‘linearity’, (3) ‘invariance’, (4) ‘biuniqueness’ and (5) ‘local determinacy’. These are familiar enough that I need not pause here to recapitulate Chomsky’s definitions. But it must have struck the classical phonemicist of 1962 to hear his work so described, since the terms (biuniqueness excluded) appear to have been coined (like the pejorative label ‘taxonomic phonemics’ itself) by Chomsky. (170) Oenbring / 110 Crafting New Identity through Appeals to Tradition In a 1963 chapter in The Handbook of Mathematical Psychology “Formal Properties of Grammars,” Chomsky first introduced his dichotomy between competence and performance: a dichotomy that would be a defining element of Chomsky’s work in the mid-sixties. As I explain in the introduction, competence deals with native speakers intuitions of well-formedness while performance has to do with what speakers actually say in real social situations. In “Formal Properties,” Chomsky explains the dichotomy in part as follows: while competence involves the speaker’s “knowledge of his language,” performance relates to “certain aspects of his behavior as he puts competence to use” (326). While Chomsky’s mentalist agenda in “Formal Properties” is clear, he is more circumspect in regard to his mentalist proclamations than he would be later in the decade (see, for example, 327-328). Instead, Chomsky looks outside his home discipline to the fledgling field of cognitive psychology to ground his claims regarding the mind. Looking for support to undergird his claims that knowledge of language (i.e., competence) should be the proper object of linguistic inquiry, Chomsky states that “psychologists have long recognized that a description of what an organism does and a description of what it knows can be very different things (cf. Lashley 1929, p. 533; Tolman, 1932, p. 364)” Oenbring / 111 (326).111 Chomsky also claims Saussure’s langue / parole dichotomy as a direct historical precursor for his competence / performance divide. As Joseph notes in his piece “Ideologizing Saussure,” a quasi-rhetorical analysis of how Chomsky and Bloomfield both used the Cours in order to legitimate their own systems, one of Chomsky’s main goals in “Formal Properties” is to claim affinity with the Cours — a piece that Chomsky claims “inaugurated the modern era of language study” (327) — in order to frame his own work as following in the footsteps of an original linguistic authority and established scientific methodological tradition, thereby making the post-Bloomfieldians the interlopers. Specifically, Joseph suggests that “Formal Properties”: represents Chomsky’s first extensive attempt to align himself with a preBloomfieldian precursor. In the early 1960s, Chomsky’s main opposition was the linguistic establishment dominated by the former students of Bloomfield, many of whom tried to portray Chomsky as a Young Turk with no respect for the tradition they were upholding. Chomsky defused this weapon by finding a tradition older than theirs with which to align his own views. What he found was the [Cours]. It allowed him to portray the neo-Bloomfieldians as the true upstarts, and himself as the defender of traditional linguistic enquiry. (68) Chomsky invokes Saussure’s name in order to associate himself with a venerable preBloomfieldian precursor, claiming for his party the banner of scientific linguistics. 112 111 That Chomsky would first introduce a bold and important distinction like the competence / performance divide in a book directed to an audience of psychologists (in particular cognitive psychologists), not linguists is, for certain, interesting from a rhetorical perspective. Oenbring / 112 While Chomsky invokes the authority of the Cours in order to support the idea of an abstract formal system of relationships (langue / competence), not language as it is actually used (parole / performance), that should the proper object of linguistic inquiry, Chomsky, nevertheless, critiques the limitations of Saussure’s dichotomy in “Formal Properties.”113 Indeed, we might call what Chomsky engages in “Formal Properties” a strategic misreading of the Cours; Chomsky uses the authority of the Cours and its famous langue / parole divide as rhetorical support for his own largely unique dichotomy. Joseph, for example, notes that: the agenda behind Chomsky (1963) is to highlight every possible correlation between [the Cours] and Chomsky’s own work. The principal misreading motivated by this agenda is the claimed identity of Comskyan linguistic competence with Saussurean langue. Chomsky (1963) completely ignores … the most salient features of langue, first that it has both an individual and a social aspect, neither of which can be conceived without the other (cf. Chomsky 1986: 16) (68) As Joseph suggests, Chomsky latches onto Saussure’s model, a model that had some respect among linguists, only to distort its core ideas. In this regard, Chomsky’s using Saussure’s model as a foothold, only to critique its limitations, is roughly analogous to Anderson similarly notes that Chomsky’s “claims that this earlier work (whether philosophical or linguistic) was in some way the source or origin of notions in generative grammar would have to be qualified as mere rationalization ex post facto. Chomsky’s ideas were developed largely in isolation from the linguistic tradition” (322). 113 Chomsky claims that “our discussion departs from a strict Saussurian conception in two ways. First, we say nothing about the semantic side of langue. … Second, our conception of langue differs from Saussure’s in one fundamental respect; namely, langue must be represented as a generative process based on recursive rules” (328). 112 Oenbring / 113 how Chomsky had earlier treated formal logic; Chomsky used models supported by a tradition of inquiry only to discard important elements of their core claims and carry on without those core notions.114 However, Saussure has not been the only pre-Bloomfieldian precursor that Chomsky has invoked in his attempts to claim the authority of tradition. In the sixties, for example, Chomsky invoked the name and authority of several other even earlier preBloomfieldian precursors, including most prominently, the following: the Port-Royal grammarians Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694) and Claude Lancelot (1615-1695); linguist, philosopher, and diplomat Wihelm von Humboldt (1767-1835); and even philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650).115 Indeed, invoking the authority of older linguists, philosophers, and scientists has been, as I shall demonstrate later, a rhetorical maneuver that Chomsky has routinely used throughout his work. Going Negative: Boundary Work 114 Remember that constructive nominalism, the philosophical framework he had used to ground his earliest publication, was strongly anti-mentalist and only cautiously realist. Chomsky by the 1960s was openly mentalist and realist. 115 As I chronicle later in this study, perhaps the most interesting of these pre-Bloomfieldian precursors is Descartes, whose name had long been associated with a deprecated school of thought held clearly distinct in philosophical discourse from the classical modern ‘empiricism’ of Locke, Hume, Berkeley. That school is classical modern ‘rationalism’, something Chomsky has, largely successfully, construed as an early form of mentalism. Although the ‘opposite’ empirical school of Locke, Hume, and Berkeley, could not be said to rule the study of philosophy in the early-to-mid twentieth century, the logical positivist variant of empiricism did have a prominent place in contemporary philosophical inquiry. By invoking Descartes’ name in works like Aspects and Cartesian Linguistics, Chomsky worked to construe his methods as both part of a long tradition, deprecated in recent work. The effect of Chomsky’s claimed affinity to (or perhaps descent from) the long deprecated throne of Descartes is to construct the existence a ‘pendulum swing’ back to rationalism. Oenbring / 114 As Chomsky’s critique of post-Bloomfieldian phonology in Current Issues suggests, by the sixties Chomsky and his followers did more than articulate what they thought to be a unique set of positive assertions for the program of generative grammar; they did more than articulate a unique disciplinary identity for generative grammar, an identity decidedly opposed to the post-Bloomfieldian approach. From the beginning of the sixties until the end of the decade, Chomsky and his followers also engaged in a continuous program to root out the remaining elements of post-Bloomfieldian linguistics; they had made their bold claims for the identity of linguistics, and now sought to make the kill. To use the terminology that rhetoricians of science like Charles Alan Taylor (1996), following sociologist Gieryn (e.g., 1999) have used to describe disputes between rival groups of scholars each seeking to lay claim to the banner of ‘science’, what Chomsky and his followers engaged in by critiquing the post-Bloomfieldians was boundary work: attempting to set rival theories as outside the boundaries of science. As Gieryn argues, in boundary work “all sides seek to legitimate their claims about natural reality as scientifically made and vetted inside the authoritative cultural space, while drawing a map to put discrepant claims and claimants outside (or, at least, on the margins). Real science is demarcated from several categories of posers: pseudoscience, amateur science, deviant or fraudulent science, bad science, junk science, popular science” (16). What’s more, Gieryn notes that “boundary-work to exclude and impostor ‘scientist’ will focus attention on the poser’s failure to conform to expected methodological or ethical standards various mapped out as necessary for genuine Oenbring / 115 scientific practice” (22).While boundary work is not exclusively negative in polarity,116 confrontational moments are, for certain, the clearest instances of the phenomenon. As many scholars have noted, the most vitriolic attacks on the postBloomfieldians were not carried out by Chomsky, but were instead carried out by his more motivated (rabid?) students and former students; Chomsky-Darwin was no doubt helped in that he had at his command a graduate program producing crops of young would-be Huxleys. Indeed, Chomsky and Halle encouraged even first year MIT graduate students to participate actively in the intellectual culture of linguistics, creating a clear divide between the young army of generative grammarians and the older generation of post-Bloomfieldians. As Newmeyer notes in the following pair of quotes, the youth weren’t afraid to tell the older generation that they were incorrect, routinely picking apart the presentations of post-Bloomfieldians at conferences. Newmeyer suggests that: It must be admitted, however, that the confrontational style that many early generativists adopted in their writings and in their behavior at public conferences was also very effective at winning over the young. Chomsky himself has always been rather restrained, at least in public. But two of his earliest collaborators, Robert B. Lees and Paul Postal, became legendary for their uncompromising attacks on the work of the “Old Guard.” No paper or presentation that betrayed an empiricist orientation to linguistics could get by unscathed. Some of these attacks 116 Indeed, once a set of methods has installed itself upon the throne of truth [i.e., once it has achieved hegemony] it no longer needs a sword to engage in boundary work; its mere dominance is a form of boundary work. Oenbring / 116 were nothing less than vicious, going well beyond the norms of scholarly criticism, and were felt to impugn their opponents’ intelligence and character as well as their ideas about linguistic research. While Newmeyer avoids the term, what he is speaking of here are commonly referred to as ad hominem (and technically in the classical tradition referred to as argumentum ad personam) appeals. This intergenerational tension was certainly heightened by the political atmosphere of the sixties, despite the fact that many of the old guard no doubt would have been sympathetic with the political ideals of the new generation of the professoriate being trained in the sixties. Nonetheless, the confrontational style of rhetoric ruled the day. Newmeyer continues: The mood on campuses in the 1960s was conducive to the success of a confrontational style. Students who perhaps an hour earlier had raised their voices in anger at a civil rights or anti-war rally felt instantly with Lees or Postal whose barrage of rhetoric was directed against a generally accepted set of intellectual propositions. The similarities of style between political and linguistic revolutionaries apparently led some students to think that generative grammar must have an intrinsically progressive political content. (The Politics of Linguistics 81)117 It should be noted that Postal, one Chomsky’s original bulldogs that Newmeyer notes here eventually became a generative semanticist and now directs much of his academic work to attempting to directly refute Chomsky’s project (see, for example, Skeptical Linguistic Essays, “A Linguistics Corrupted” [with Robert Levine] [Postal and Levine are also working on a manuscript 117 Oenbring / 117 While this end of this quote is certainly speculative, one should not underestimate how the revolutionary fervor of the 1960s might have caused among the new generation of the professoriate being trained at the time a desire to feel like they were participating in a scientific revolution. The Aspects Program, the ‘Standard Theory’, and the Appeal to Meaning A common analogy made in generative grammar is to refer to Syntactic Structures as the Old Testament and 1965’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax as the New Testament, an analogy that I have apparently not avoided. That is to say, Aspects has, like Syntactic Structures, undeniably played an important role in the history of generative grammar — and has been cited by other scholars as an ultimate source to legitimate further inquiry — but is, for certain, difficult to account for without over-romanticizing its influence. (Nonetheless, I will try.) The model proposed by Aspects is commonly referred to by generative grammarians as the standard theory.118 However, the term standard theory is a misleading term as it was developed by Chomsky himself.119 Nevertheless, the term standard theory is a term that is used commonly, and often unreflectively — even by historians of linguistics (see, for example, Harlow 331). tentatively titled The Intellectually Corrupt Linguistics of Avram Noam Chomsky (The AntiChomsky Reader 249)]). 118 Sometimes included in the standard theory is Katz and Postal’s 1964 book An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Description — a volume that, despite its title suggesting clear systembuilding ambitions, demonstrates clear deference to Chomsky’s ideas. (What is generally credited as Katz and Postal’s main contribution to the standard theory is the notion that transformations to do not change the meaning of the lexical items that move, a notion that can be traced back to Katz’ earlier 1963 article with Fodor “The Structure of a Semantic Theory.”) 119 What’s more, Chomsky himself was the impetus behind the canonization of Aspects and An Integrated Theory as the master texts of the standard theory. Oenbring / 118 With the Aspects program, Chomsky made several (usually considered vital) updates to the current model of generative grammar, many of them technical and therefore outside the scope of this study. Among the more important technical propositions of Aspects are: the addition of a lexicon (basically a ‘dictionary’ of words) to the base (i.e., the death of generalized transformations); the addition of base recursion (recursion means that the system of rules can feedback, or call upon itself); and the addition of ∆-nodes, the first semantically and phonologically null placeholder (i.e., having no phonetic manifestation) that Chomsky — this time following Katz and Postal — would suggest.120 While the technical advancements of Aspects are noteworthy, what secured the text’s importance and its fame are its bolder (and mostly vaguer) proclamations — particularly those relating to the notion of meaning (e.g., the deep structure / surface structure divide). Indeed, it is common to suggest that the explosion of intellectual activity surrounding syntax that occurred in the mid-sixties occurred because Aspects brought “semantics out of the closet” (McCawley [1976: 6], qtd. in Newmeyer [1986:81]). This is interesting, seeing that Chomsky’s propositions relating to meaning were not, by and large, the most novel features of the Aspects model;121 as presented in Aspects, deep structure is primarily a syntactic rather than semantic notion. Indeed, Seuren argues in his Western Linguistics that in Aspects Chomsky makes “no effort … to 120 Chomsky and other generative grammarians would propose many more semantically and phonologically null elements in the seventies and eighties. 121 Indeed, Harris notes in The Linguistics Wars that despite being referred to jokingly as the New Testament “Aspects’ hermeneutical potential is much closer to the prophetic book of the Old Testament than the New, and subsequent generations of linguists have found support in it for an amazing range of propositions” (82). Oenbring / 119 fill in any details of the Semantic Component. Aspects is not about meaning representations or about projection rules, but about syntax and its relation to the lexicon” (Seuren [1998: 487]). Although it is true that Chomsky did not first articulate many of the bolder ideas that have become associated with Aspects in the book itself,122 Aspects has, nevertheless, become the most famous of Chomsky’s technical texts of this era, with Chomsky and others using the claims of Aspects to undergird their later claims. For certain, the fame of Aspects has to do with all of the following: the attractiveness of the technical models presented in the book; the emphasis that Chomsky and his followers have placed on the book after the fact (i.e., their attempts to canonize it); the vague and alluring nature of Chomsky’s proclamations regarding meaning in the text; and also mere historical accident. Nevertheless, good rhetorical analysis — of the type I try to provide in this study — pays attention to what people actually read into texts rather than what is actually there; good rhetorical analysis pays attention to the actual reception of a text. That is to say, there are good reasons for my focus on the rhetorical nature of Chomsky’s statements in regard to meaning in Aspects — specifically, that his statements have been remarkably successful in encouraging other linguists to adopt his model.123 Indeed, while Chomsky himself has always made clear that deep structure 122 For example, Chomsky speaks of deep structure and universal grammar in Current Issues (60). 123 Randy Harris also notes that although Chomsky’s statements regarding meaning in Aspects are not extensively supported, Chomsky’s statements about meaning (specifically deep structure) nevertheless became the most important ideas in the book to the linguistic community. Thus Aspects can properly be read as an argument for Chomsky’s analyses of meaning. Harris states that “it’s true that Aspects does not offer specific justifications for deep structure, but since deep structure was the linchpin of a theory that the entire community … found very compelling, the Aspects model itself was quite literally an extended argument for deep structure” ( Harris 1993: 167). Oenbring / 120 should not be understood as an explanation of anything, the concept of deep structure, nevertheless, became the ideological lynchpin of late-60s generative work; others read much more into deep structure as presented in Aspects than is actually stated in the study. Nevertheless, Chomsky, due to his bold style of exposition, gave the generation of generative grammarians being trained in the mid-sixties plenty of reasons to believe that the system he was presenting was both totally new and was profoundly insightful. First of all, like Current Issues, in the early pages of Aspects — what I shall call the world creation section — Chomsky attempts to system build; Chomsky makes it clear that what the text offers is a system of positive, largely innovative proposals. For example, early on in Aspects, Chomsky boldly declares that linguistic theory “is mentalistic, since it is concerned with discovering a mental reality underlying actual behavior” (4). (Notice how he now avoids the hedging found in “Formal Properties” and Current Issues.) On the same page, Chomsky reasserts the dichotomy between competence and performance. Still early in the book, Chomsky reasserts his levels of adequacy schema, this time avoiding presenting and analyzing the lowest level observational adequacy (i.e., the level of the post-Bloomfieldians). Instead, Chomsky attempts to steer linguistic theory toward the lofty goal of explanatory adequacy by dividing only between it and descriptive adequacy; mere observational adequacy has been left by the wayside. Finally, still within the world-creation pages, Chomsky articulates a concept that would become a rallying point for linguists of many stripes: the Oenbring / 121 notion of universal grammar (the concept that there is a system of rules governing syntax and language acquisition that is part of the human genetic endowment). Like his other core ideas, Chomsky first introduces the deep structure / surface structure divide early in Aspects, claiming that “the syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation” (16). Although this proclamation sounds authoritative, the evidence actually presented is quite skimpy. To provide evidence for the deep structure / surface structure divide, Chomsky examines the following pair of sentences: (6) I persuaded John to leave (7) I expected John to leave (22) Despite appearing deceptively similar on the surface, sentences (6) and (7), according to Chomsky, encode quite different grammatical relations. That is to say (6) and (7) “are the same in surface structure, but very different in the deep structure that underlies them and determines their semantic interpretation” (24). While in (6) John can be said unproblematically to be the direct object of persuade, in (7) the whole infinitive clause John to leave constitutes the direct object of expect.124 These two example sentences have quite different internal grammatical relations despite appearing on surface to be nearly identical. Thus, Chomsky claims that these examples illustrate “how unrevealing surface structure may be as to underlying deep structure” (24).125 124 I am simplifying for explanatory purposes. Although Chomsky suggests precedent for the notion of deep structure in the works of Humboldt and Wittgenstein (recall his invocation of pre-Bloomfieldian precursors), his notion of 125 Oenbring / 122 Chomsky’s specific discussions of deep structure and surface structure are, by turns, alluringly vague (allowing interpretive creativity), and at other times technically formulated using formal syntax; as presented in Aspects, the deep structure / surface structure divide is both an alluring rhetorical dichotomy and a technical formal definition. While the alluring rhetorical dichotomy side won followers for Chomsky and his model, the technically defined side of deep structure allowed Chomsky and his followers to have in their possession a rigorous, possibly even scientific way to deal with questions of meaning. That is to say, Chomsky and his followers had in their hands a dual-barreled rhetoric with the concept of deep structure. Deep structure allowed the appearance of a rigorous way to deal with meaning and the appearance of profound insight. As many scholars have noted (including Chomsky in Aspects [24]), the idea that there exists a deep, hidden level of meaning far beneath the mere surface level of language is a very old concept in Western intellectualizing regarding language. Indeed, Seuren (1971) suggests that: No idea is older in the history of linguistics than the thought that there is, somehow hidden underneath the surface of sentences, a form or a structure which provides a semantic analysis and lays bare their logical structure. In Plato’s Cratylus the theory was proposed, deriving from Heraclitus’ theory of deep structure is uniquely his own — in that he defines it according to the relations of items in hierarchic syntactic trees. Basically, the level deep structure as articulated in Aspects is analogous to the step right before but not including the transformations in Syntactic Structures. However, in the Aspects model lexical items are inserted in the tree at deep structure, not produced by morphophonemic phrase structure rules as in Syntactic Structures. (Recall that the analysis in Syntactic Structures dealt largely with the interaction of morphological elements.) Oenbring / 123 explanatory underlying structure in physical nature, that words contain within themselves bits of syntactic structure giving their meanings” (1973 [1971: 528]) Here Seuren traces the surface structure / deep structure divide back to the Greeks. Elsewhere, other scholars (not to mention Chomsky himself) have trace the history of what would become the surface structure / deep structure divide back to the Middle Ages. 126 Nevertheless, the long history of speculation regarding the existence of something like deep structure indicates that there is clearly a seductive ideological element (read: non-scientific) at work. Whether or not Chomsky had originally intended deep structure to play an important role in Aspects itself, in later work he would emphasize the importance of the divide between surface structure and deep structure; he would make the dichotomy a central feature of the Aspects model / standard theory. For example, by the mid sixties, Chomsky would use the deep structure / surface structure as a tool for arguing for the irrelevance of post-Bloomfieldian work. In his 1966 book consisting of reedited lectures originally delivered to the Linguistic Society of America Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar, Chomsky, for example, uses the divide between surface structure and deep structure as a wedge technique, charging his critics with suggesting that the linguist “must limit himself to what I called … ‘surface structure’, in fact, to certain restricted aspects of surface structure” (25). Post-Bloomfieldian work is uninteresting 126 More recently, Seuren (1998) notes that the existence of something like the surface structure / deep structure distinction in the work of medieval grammarian Sanctius, suggesting that “idea it is necessary to define, for each sentence, a semantic representation, and to define a rule system relating semantic representations to surface sentences and vice versa. This conclusion had already been drawn in principle by Sanctius” (1998: 474). (It should, however, be noted that Percival and Robin Lakoff had much earlier noted this.) Oenbring / 124 because it does not pay attention to deep structure. Moreover, in later work Chomsky would also work to emphasize the importance of the notion of deep structure to the Aspects model. Indeed, in the seventies he would claim the notion of deep structure to be the core claim of the standard theory when he was trying to shore up the place of the extended standard theory. That is to say, whether or not Chomsky originally intended the surface structure / deep structure distinction to be a prominent element of the Aspects model, in later work he made the dichotomy one of the central propositions of the book — and by extension the lynchpin of the entire generative community. (That is to say, Chomsky made the notion of deep structure a core element of generative disciplinary identity.) Rhetorical Elements of The Sound Pattern of English Fulfilling the desired abstract system circumscribed in Current Issues and other earlier work, Chomsky and Halle’s long-anticipated 1968 book The Sound Pattern of English (SPE) offered a thoroughly-developed system of generative phonology to the linguistic community. Now one of Chomsky’s more infamous technical books (even among continued supporters of Chomsky), SPE united abstract universalizing phonology and system-building ambitions with a bold program of realist claims. That is to say, SPE is bold and takes itself seriously — all while offering ornate, abstract, and dubious derivations. (Needless to say, an extensive analysis of the SPE model is outside the scope of this study.) Oenbring / 125 Following Current Issues, a core idea undergirding SPE is that the linguist’s task is to develop elegant (a.k.a. best possible) theories rather than the most empiricallycareful theories, thereby allowing the linguist to posit more abstract entities and processes than a merely observationally adequate account. Chomsky’s term to describe this notion is evaluation procedures, a notion that he distinguishes from discovery procedures (i.e., that all we can do is evaluate grammars; we cannot discover directly the grammar in our minds). (Recall that Chomsky first drew this dichotomy in Syntactic Structures.) Chomsky and Halle spend the early pages of the SPE setting up what appear to be a unique and new set of methodological assumptions. In the preface of the study, they argue that: For one concerned solely with the facts of English, the gradations of stress may not seem more important than the gradations of aspiration. Our reason for concentrating on the former and neglecting the latter is that we are not, in this work concerned exclusively or even primarily with the facts of English as such. We are interested in these facts for the light they shed on linguistic theory (on what, in an earlier period, would have been have been called “universal grammar”) and for what they suggest about the nature of mental processes in general. It seems to us that that gradations of stress in English can be explained on the basis of very deep-seated and nontrivial assumptions about universal grammar and that this conclusion is highly suggestive for psychology” (viii) There are many interesting rhetorical maneuvers here. For one, Chomsky and Halle claim that the facts of English are only of interest insofar as they offer insight into a Oenbring / 126 totalizing system of phonology that can account for the facts of all language; even though the examples are in English the work is not “concerned exclusively or even primarily with the facts of English.” The formalisms that they use to describe English stress are not mere formalisms. Rather, they “can be explained on the basis of very deep-seated and nontrivial assumptions about universal grammar.” What’s more, Chomsky and Halle suggest that their findings have implications for other, more biologically-focused fields, stating that their conclusions are “highly suggestive for psychology.” Despite the fact that the work begins by hedging, suggesting that the theories presented are only at an intermediate state, SPE — due in part to its bold claims, and in part to its expansive (although by no means exhaustive) treatment of English phonology — became the main point of reference for later generative phonology. What’s more, the book’s emphasis on evaluation procedures helped legitimate an environment in which linguistic theories ultimately boil down to judgment calls, and the fact that Chomsky and Halle — two of the most famous linguists in the world by this point — offered their own in the book, no doubt helped the prominence of SPE.127 As Anderson suggests, one of the most important features of SPE is that it institutionalized and legitimated a particular metalanguage; it gave linguists interested in working within a universally-focused theory of phonology a common parlance and point of reference. Specifically, Anderson states that: the publication of SPE also had another, symbolic importance. It marked the end of an era in which the major works of generative linguistics (in syntax as well as What’s more, one could certainly make the case for rhetorical reading of the book’s tome-like appearance. 127 Oenbring / 127 in phonology) were circulated primarily … among a small circle of insiders, with those not on the necessary mailing lists confined to secondhand reports and rumors for their information on the shape of theoretical developments. Overt, formal publication of a reasonably definitive description of the principles of the theory made it much more a matter of public property, and enfranchised a much broader audience of potential contributors and critics. (328) Whereas those outside of Cambridge were out of the loop before SPE, they now were “enfranchised.” While the assumed power of MIT to establish a model no doubt is present in Anderson’s assessment, Anderson, true to his generativist roots, does not question Chomsky’s authority to spread doctrine. The Extended Standard Theory and Boundary Work As I have previously suggested, the vague propositions of Aspects regarding surface structure and deep structure eventually led to an extended disagreement between two competing camps: the so-called interpretive semanticists (led by Chomsky) and the so-called generative semanticists (led by George Lakoff and James McCawley). This was a disagreement that was by many accounts rather nasty. The so-called linguistics wars have been given thorough treatment by Newmeyer (1980 [1986]), Harris (1993), and Huck and Goldsmith (1995), and I shall say only a limited amount about them here. Broadly stated, generative semanticists found Chomsky’s notion of deep structure, as expressed in Aspects too limited. Generative semanticists sought to break down the boundaries between syntax and semantics, all while paying more attention to pragmatic Oenbring / 128 and discourse features. In pursuit of a deep, presumably unifying level of meaning, generative semanticists proposed ever more formal, abstract and dubious deep structures.128 Along the way, the notion of deep structure became a defining element of generative semanticists’ identity. However, one could argue that by defining their practice against the limited notion of deep structure promoted by Chomsky, generative semanticists (particularly George Lakoff) took the bait; they were defining their school in regard to a notion deeply associated with Chomsky’s person (and that he therefore had the prerogative to redefine).129 Boiled down to its core elements, the plot of the linguistics wars doesn’t sound particularly dramatic, but it goes something like this: inspired by the notion of deep structure presented in Aspects, Lakoff and others went in search of a unified deep layer of meaning; the theory spread while Chomsky was at Berkeley; Chomsky returned to Cambridge, published several important pieces on the place of semantics in generative grammar, the field moved to the extended standard theory; and all was right again in the world. While the available accounts of the history of this debate differ in their emphasis (e.g., Newmeyer suggests that Chomsky won because he was right, and Huck and Goldsmith suggest Chomsky won in part because of his authority and in part because of institutional sanctioning), the available histories of the linguistics wars all avoid extensive analysis of the rhetorical features of Chomsky’s most important publications during this period. Such an analysis — in addition to an analysis of the rhetorical 128 I am, however, simplifying the set of terminology for ease of exposition. What’s more, by changing nuances associated with the notion of deep structure — something that he was privileged to do because of his authority – Chomsky was able to, in effect, pull the rug out from underneath the generative semanticists. 129 Oenbring / 129 maneuvers involved in Chomsky’s work to move the field from the standard theory to what he calls the extended standard theory (thus leading to the first of Chomsky’s subsequent sub-revolutions in the field) — is what I aim to provide in the following pages. In a 1970 book chapter130 “Deep Structure, Surface Structure, and Semantic Interpretation,” Chomsky engages in his first major attempt to pull the rug out from underneath the generative semantics movement. From a rhetorical perspective the goals of the piece are as follows: to assert the primacy of the set of theories presented in Aspects; and to draw a clear line between his work and the theories of the generative semantics school, an approach that he denigrates. (Recall that many generative semanticists thought of their work as well within the goals of Aspects.) Chomsky engages in boundary work; he attempts to frame the generative semanticists as promoters of theories that are by turns misleading or not distinguishable from his own program. Starting with an overview of the recent history of the field, in “Deep Structure, Surface Structure” Chomsky makes clear that there are important differences between the proposals of Aspects and those of a “more ‘semantically-based’ grammar”131 (1970 [1972: 62]); Chomsky draws a neat dichotomy between Aspects-influenced work and that of the generative semanticists. (Once again, it is important to remember that many generative semanticists considered their work as fulfilling the goals of and working “Deep Structure, Surface Structure, and Semantic Interpretation” is based in part in on lectures Chomsky first gave in Japan in summer 1966. 131 Of course, by this he means the generative semanticists. 130 Oenbring / 130 within the tradition of Aspects; Chomsky is attempting to frame generative semantics as a clearly different tradition, distinguishable from Aspects-inspired work.) Continuing, Chomsky assumes “two universal language-independent systems of representation.” Chomsky draws a methodological dichotomy between “a phonetic system for the specification of sound” and a “semantic system for the specification of meaning” (62). While Chomsky suggests work on the phonetic side to be on track (specifically because of his joint 1968 publication with Halle, The Sound Pattern of English), he recognizes the difficulty that linguists and philosophers are having in semantics. Chomsky laments that “in the domain of semantics there are, needless to say, problem of fact and principle that have barely been approached, and there is no reasonably concrete or well-defined ‘theory of semantic representation’ to which one can refer” (62). Later on in the piece, Chomsky continues to denigrate the study of meaning in contemporary linguistic inquiry, stating that: A good part of the critique and the elaboration of the standard theory in the past few years has focused on the notion of deep structure and the relation of semantic representation to deep structure. This is quite natural. No area of linguistic theory is more veiled in obscurity and confusion and it may be that fundamentally new ideas and insights will be needed for substantial progress to be made in bringing order to this domain. (76) In this statement, Chomsky is priming the pump for later changes he will try to bring to the field. As the study of meaning is in a state of chaos, what is needed is “fundamentally new ideas and insights” (read: a revolution). Oenbring / 131 Chomsky then spends several paragraphs outlining the major assumptions of the Aspects program, offering a label clearly meant to underline the importance of the book’s proposals. Specifically, Chomsky suggests that “I will refer to any elaboration of this theory of grammar as a ‘standard theory’” (66).132 (Note how early in the piece Chomsky still refers to “a standard theory,” admitting the existence of several possible standard theories, before speaking openly of “the standard theory” [e.g., 70] later in the piece.) The goal of this move is quite clear: Chomsky is attempting to assert the primacy of the program articulated in Aspects. One of Chomsky’s main goals in the piece is to suggest his theories, unlike those of generative semanticists, are well-formed (i.e., precisely crafted using formal logical syntax). Continuing to draw a line between the “syntactically-based standard theory” and competing “semantically-based” (69) theories, Chomsky, nevertheless, attempts to collapse competing frameworks into the standard theory; Chomsky suggests that the theories of generative semanticists are by turns both different and indistinguishable from his own work.133 After working to assert the primacy of the Aspects program, Chomsky then shifts gears to proposing a way to deal with language phenomena such as Focus, However, Chomsky also claims that this is label is “merely for convenience of discussion and with no intention of implying that it has some unique conceptual or empirical status” (66). 133 For example, picking apart a set of proposals by McCawley, Chomsky claims, for example, that “McCawley’s analysis, right or wrong, is simply a realization of the standard theory” (79). After engaging in a similar critique of Lakoff’s work, Chomsky makes similar claims regarding the case system advocated by Fillmore in his famous 1968 essay “The Case for Case.” Chomsky’s critique is the same: all of these theories are not “empirically distinguishable from the standard system” (69). Accordingly, critiques of the standard theory “have been, so far, without consequence” (78). 132 Oenbring / 132 Presupposition, and even intonation within the Aspects model.134 Focus and Presupposition were (and remain) a problem of generative grammar as they are a clear case where discourse and pragmatic features have a substantive effect on the meaning of the sentence; the surface structure clearly has an effect on meaning. Consider the following pair of sentences: (75) (i) did Bill give John the BOOK (ii) did Bill give the book to JOHN (102) A theory that claims that all meaning should be defined at deep structure (as the Aspects program suggests) appears to be unable to account for the different nuances of meaning in the above sentences. However, there are clear differences in the meaning, or at least the occasion in which one might use, the two sentences. Whereas in (i) John is the likely object of previous conversation (i.e., the focus), in (ii) it is more likely the book.135 Chomsky recognizes that Focus and Presupposition may appear to be a serious problem for the Aspects model, stating that “I wish only to emphasize that these notions seem to involve surface structure in an essential way, and thus to provide strong counterevidence to the standard theory, which stipulates that semantic interpretation must be entirely determined by deep structure” (101). Chomsky nevertheless finds a way to “preserve the standard theory” (101) all while accounting for the role that Focus and 134 Focus and Presupposition had been a major concern of generative semanticists such as Lakoff (see, for example, Lakoff [1965], [1967], [1972]), and, no doubt Chomsky’s inclusion of this discussion is a result of such analyses. Nevertheless, in his more than twenty-page discussion of Focus and Presupposition, Chomsky only cites Lakoff in one footnote. 135 Chomsky, for example, analyzes the sentence is it JOHN who writes poetry? , stating that “the semantic representation of [the sentence] must indicate, in some manner, that John is the FOCUS of the sentence and that the sentence expresses the presupposition that someone writes poetry” (89). Oenbring / 133 Presupposition play in meaning by gerrymandering the theory through a technical redefinition. (I do not have room for an extensive explanation the specifics here.) What’s more, Chomsky endorses these manipulations of the standard theory despite the fact that they clearly cut into the beauty of deep structure as articulated in Aspects. Any substantive content that the theory of deep structure may have had is now, much less clear; the theory of deep structure is now much less clearly non-vacuous. Indeed, Chomsky directly acknowledges that the changes that he sponsors make the theory “merely a notational variant of a theory that determines focus and presupposition from the surface structure.” In the end, however, Chomsky maintains a firm commitment to the Aspects program, arguing that the technical manipulations he proposes “do not touch on one aspect of the standard theory, namely, the hypothesis that the grammatical relations that enter into semantic interpretation are those represented in deep structure” (1970 [1972: 102]). In a related essay from the same time period, “Some Empirical Issues in the theory of Transformational Grammar,” a piece first presented at a 1969 conference at UT Austin and published later in the important 1972 volume Goals of Linguistic Theory, Chomsky continues developing the issues explored in “Deep Structure, Surface Structure.” While continuing to assert the primacy of the Aspects program, Chomsky makes the bolder move of the field from the standard theory to the extended standard theory. As he does in “Deep Structure” Chomsky begins “Some Empirical Issues” with Oenbring / 134 an assertion of the primacy of the Aspects program. 136 Chomsky, however, admits several problems with the current standard theory — specifically in regard to the theory of deep structure. Chomsky offers two options for rectifying the situation in “Some Empirical Issues.” The first is to adopt a generative semantics, a school whose major contributors Chomsky dissects and critiques later in the piece. The second is to accept the standard theory “approximately as given” (73), but to reconstitute it as the extended standard theory. The rhetorical purpose of this label is to suggest development in the theory, all while emphasizing its continuity with the standard theory. While Chomsky largely avoids indicating the origin of the concerns that he is promoting in the piece, the differences between the standard theory and the extended standard theory largely reflect the concerns of generative semanticists (e.g., Focus and Presupposition) as well as more in the fold generative grammarians (e.g., Jackendoff). The extended standard theory differs from the standard theory, according to Chomsky,137 only in that: semantic interpretation is held to be determined by the pair (deep structure, surface structure) of Σ, rather than by the deep structure alone; further, it is proposed that insofar as grammatical relations play a role in determining meaning, it is the grammatical relations of the deep structure that are relevant (as before), but that such matters as scope of “logical elements” and quantifiers, coreference, Like in “Deep Structure,” Chomsky strategically invokes Greek letters and formalism in his definition of deep structure, with the goal being to make a case that his theory of deep structure is more well-defined than that offered by the generative semanticists. Chomsky states that “the concept of ‘deep structure’ is well-defined: the deep structure of a derivation Σ = (P1,…Pn) is the phrase marker Pi such that for j ≤ i, Pj is formed from Pj..1 by a lexical transformation, and for j ˃ i, Pj is formed by a nonlexical transformation” (71). 137 We can defer to Chomsky as he offers an explicit definition. 136 Oenbring / 135 focus and certain kinds of presupposition, and certain other properties, are determined by rules that take surface structure (more precisely, phonetically interpreted surface structure) into account. (1972: 134) As this passage suggests, what were previously derided as mere surface features of language, not of interest to linguistic theory, Chomsky now recognizes as features that encode meaning in a substantial way. Although “Deep Structure” and “Some Empirical Issues” are important from both rhetorical and methodological perspective, Chomsky’s landmark publication of this era is his 1970 book chapter “Remarks on Nominalization.”138 Unlike “Some Empirical Issues” and “Deep Structure, Surface Structure,” “Remarks” spends no room negotiating the standard theory / extended standard theory nomenclature. Instead, Chomsky attempts to pull the rug out from underneath the generative semanticists and foment a would-be revolution by claiming that linguists should follow a path different from the path that they had been on all while offering several inaccessible technical innovations for the model. In doing as such, Chomsky seems to hollow out the impetus for generative grammar, all while solidifying the ideology of autonomous syntax. As I explain in the introduction, with “Remarks” Chomsky attempts to put the brakes on the unconstrained search for a unified deep, abstract level of meaning (a major goal of generative semanticists, but not exclusively generative semanticists).139 In While not published until 1970, “Remarks” developed out of Chomsky’s lectures at MIT gave after after his return in 1967 (Newmeyer [1986: 85]). 139 While the search for a unified, abstract, and deep level of meaning had been a goal of the generative semanticists, the pursuit of bedrock deep structures had been a point of disciplinary identity for many in the field at the time, not just generative semanticists. 138 Oenbring / 136 “Remarks” Chomsky contrasts the transformationalist hypothesis, endorsed by the generative semanticists, with the lexicalist hypothesis (a notion that Chomskyan Whig historians read as a fulfillment of movements originally sponsored by Aspects [see, for example, Jackendoff’s X-bar Theory]). Chomsky endorses a pursuit of the lexical hypothesis. Basically the lexical hypothesis states that nominalized verbs such as proof (which we might see as a something that has come from the verb to prove) should not be decomposed (i.e., one should not claim that these verbs are placed somewhere lower in the tree at deep structure and then move to their surface structure and change into nouns by a transformation). To back up his claim, Chomsky’s primary evidence comes from the differing acceptable distributions of derived nominals140 (e.g., proof) and gerundive nominals (e.g., providing). By suggesting that these nominalized verbs should be left alone, treating them not as the products of transformations but as individual lexical items “with fixed selectional and strict sub-categorization features,” Chomsky, however, seems to be arguing against one of the core ideas of his project. Rather, he argues that the relatedness between the noun and verb forms should be handled by another mechanism than a transformation. In this regard, “Remarks” endorses a return to ‘common sense’. Also in “Remarks” Chomsky introduces X-bar theory to generative inquiry, a theory that became institutionalized in large part due to Chomsky’s authority despite limited empirical support. As presented in “Remarks,” X-bar theory is a unified schema of notation covering syntactic hierarchies in noun phrases (NP), adjective phrases (AP), 140 It is a bit confusing that Chomsky uses the term derived here, as he is claiming that these nouns are not made by transformations. Oenbring / 137 and verb phrases (VP). The node immediately above the head (the noun, verb, or adjective) is the N’, V’, or A’ (pronounced N-bar, etc.). The node immediately above N’, V’, or A’ is an N”, V”, or A” (pronounced N-double bar). One should note, however, that Chomsky endorses this change because it seems to reduce the complexity of model, not because of extensive empirical support.141 Nevertheless, technically stated, the motivation for X-bar theory is that it displays parallelism of argument structure for differing forms like destroy and destruct. As X-bar syntax is not clearly a substantive theory, Chomsky suggests precedent for the model in Harris’ work. Chomsky reminds us that “a structure of the sort just outlined is reminiscent of the system of phrase structure analysis develop by Harris in the 1940’s” (1970 [1972: 54]). Chomsky also reminds us that the Xsuperscript convention stems from Harris, continuing “in Harris’ system, statements applying to categories represented in the form Xn (n a numeral) applied also to categories represented in the form Xm (m ˂ n)” (1972: 54).142 Chomsky’s propositions regarding X-bar theory are given their fullest exposition in Jackendoff’s X-bar Syntax. Jackendoff’s book is quite interesting from a rhetorical perspective in that it cites Chomsky’s work as if it is holy writ. 142 Just as Catholics prefer to conceptualize the modifications of Catholic dogma and hierarchy that occurred as a response to the claims of the Protestant Reformers as instead occurring sui generis (i.e., they prefer to understand the reforms as a ‘Catholic Reformation’), Chomsky, in “Deep Structure” and “Some Empirical Issues,” only rarely acknowledges the influence of generative semanticists in “Remarks.” (Indeed, Chomsky’s citations of the generative semantics movement are rare in remarks, usually occurring in footnotes.) This did not fail to draw the ire of the generative semanticists. George Lakoff’s then spouse and fellow generative semanticist, Robin Lakoff has, for example, suggested that “one reads ‘Remarks on Nominalization’ without a clue that the description there of the lexicon and of deep structure existed … and was developed only because GS [generative semanticists] pushed Chomsky to redefine his position – quite radically” (Robin Lakoff, cited in Harris [1993: 141]). 141 Oenbring / 138 After their original publications, Chomsky republished all three of “Remarks,” “Deep Structure, Surface Structure,” and “Some Empirical Issues” in a single 1972 volume Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar, condensing his three most important pieces arguing against generative semantics all while moving the field to the extended standard theory into a single volume/volley. The rhetorical goal of the single volume is to make the case that the field should follow him along in a revolution within a revolution. Indeed, Chomsky makes it clear that he is attempting to foment a rupture, stating directly in his genealogy of the field in the preface that: the three essays that follow take as their point of departure the formulation of grammatical theory presented in such work as J. J. Katz and P.M. Postal, An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions, 1964, and Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, 1965. For ease of exposition, I refer to this formulation as the “standard theory”. The essays deal with problems that arise within this framework, and present a revision of the standard theory to an “extended standard theory” (EST). (5). It is interesting that Chomsky would publish all three pieces together as a single rhetorical volley despite the fact that the three essays contradict one another. Nevertheless, if number of reviews is a good indicator of influence, Studies was a success; it led to 14 reviews in journals of broad scope and influence (Koerner and Tajima 52). With Chomsky himself criticizing the pursuit of ever more deep structures — a pursuit that had probably always been quixotic — generative inquiry lost what had been Oenbring / 139 up to then its prevailing alluring idea (that is to say, generative inquiry had lost an important element of its identity). What Chomsky left in its place after the EST essays was a syntactic theory that was both more abstract, formal, and seemingly unmotivated by empirical reality (e.g., X-bar syntax) but that in other regards was more commonsense (i.e., lexicalism). Whereas the search of an elegant way to deal with meaning had been an ultimate goal of inquiry in the Aspects period, after the EST essays, generative techniques for dealing with meaning were quirkier and more theory internal. Similarly, whereas earlier syntactic formalisms were largely motivated by the pursuit of deep structure — a layer that might be construed as explanation, they now were seemingly motivated by syntactic patterns in and of themselves. (Nevertheless, Chomsky himself has never said that deep structure explains anything.) Indeed, although generative syntacticians retained the claim that they were in pursuit of structures in the mind, syntactic formalisms now could be motivated by nothing other than syntactic formalisms. That is to say, syntax was increasingly becoming an undergirding ideology — an ideology by turns both implicit within theories but unstated and at other times explicitly formulated. The Rhetoric of the “Conditions” Framework In the later days of the extended standard theory (from 1973 to 1979), much of Chomsky’s work was focused on articulating formal, theory-internal, abstract and oftentimes byzantine conditions for interactions of elements within syntactic trees.143 143 Some historians of generative grammar give this period the label the revised extended standard theory (REST), but this is not a widely used label nor is it a label that Chomsky sponsored. Thus, I shall not use it. Oenbring / 140 This focus is clearest in Chomsky’s 1973 and 1976 papers “Conditions on Transformations,”144 and “Conditions on Rules of Grammar,” both later reprinted in Chomsky’s 1977 book Essays on Form and Interpretation. With abstraction, formalism, and theory-massaging valued more than descriptive coverage (or direct evidence as that related to observational adequacy), phonetically-null tree elements spread like wildfire. Following the goal of making the theory more abstract in the interest of making it simpler (at least in theory), Chomsky, notably, attempted to distill all movement rules into a single rule, first called Move NP (1976) later renamed and tinkered with to become Move-α (1980). With the tradition of the extended standard theory an established landmark among generative grammarians, Chomsky would now turn to that label as a way to emphasize the continuity of the entire project of generative grammar. Chomsky begins Essays on Form by stating that “the essays that follow fall within the framework of the so-called ‘extended standard theory’ (EST). More generally, the framework of assumptions, methodological and substantive, is essentially as presented in my Aspects of the Theory of Syntax and related work” (1). As this quote suggests, although Chomsky makes it clear that the work presented is part of the EST, he, however, also emphasizes the book’s continuity with Aspects. A good example of one of the conditions of later EST is the Complementizer Substitution Universal presented in “Conditions on Transformations.” The Complementizer Substitution Universal states that “only languages with clause-initial “Conditions on Transformations” stems originally from a 1969 conference paper (Newmeyer 1980 [1986: 157]). 144 Oenbring / 141 COMP permit a COMP-substitution transformation” (1973 [1977:83]).145 Note the highly theory-internal nature of this definition. That is to say, the definition is laden with terms that only have meaning within the boundaries of generative grammar.146 As this example Complementizer Substitution Universal suggests, later EST began to take more seriously the diversity of human languages. Chomsky himself continued to make bold statements for the program of generative grammar based largely on a small number of constructions with evidence taken exclusively from English. Nevertheless, later EST is generally credited as beginning the turn in generative descriptions toward a search for more general principles of human language, with the differences between human languages accounted for by parameters. (This is a rhetorical dichotomy that would become more defined [and, indeed, take center stage] during the Principles and Parameters framework.) Chomsky notes in “Conditions on Rules of Grammar” that: Even if conditions are language – or rule-particular, there are limits to the possible diversity of grammar. Thus, such conditions can be regarded as parameters that have to be fixed (for the language, or for particular rules, in the worst case), in language learning. We would then raise the question how the class of grammars so constituted, with rules that lack expressive power but parameters to be fixed independently, compares with the class of grammars permitted under a theory that 145 Of course, Chomsky was not the first to propose a conditions-type framework. The notion of ‘derivational constraints’ had been proposed by Ross. Chomsky’s early reception of conditions frameworks was, however, frosty at best. For example, Chomsky argues in “Some Empirical Issues” that “everyone would agree that unless further elaborated, the suggestion that grammars contain “derivational constraints” is vacuous. Any imaginable rule can be described as a ‘constraint on derivations’” (“Some Empirical Issues” 73). 146 Despite Chomsky’s claim that this condition is a universal, there is little evidence that this theory has been tested on more than a handful of human languages. Oenbring / 142 permits articulation of conditions on application within the formulation of the rules themselves. It has often been supposed that conditions on application of rules must be quite general, even universal, to be significant, but that need not be the case if establishing a “parametric” condition permits us to reduce substantially the class of possible rules. (175) As this quote suggests, although conditions could be formulated based on evidence from individual languages, Chomsky argues that these specific conditions should not be understood as unique quirks of individual languages. Rather each properly understood condition brings linguists closer and closer to a lush description of Universal Grammar. The Extended Standard Theory and the Rhetoric of Falsifiability While Chomsky and his followers had built the case for generative grammar in part based on the claim that it, unlike post-Bloomfieldian theories of syntax, proposed explicit, formal theories of language that could be refuted by counter-examples, in the later days of EST Chomsky began reduce his emphasis on falsifiability as a criterion for adjudicating the validity of models. Due to the “logically necessary” (1977: 2) nature of UG, counter-examples to rules are thus not enough to prove conditions false.147 Chomsky states, for example, in the introduction to Essays on Form and Interpretation that: It is also worth stressing that a condition on rules can neither be confirmed nor refuted directly by presented phenomena. Particular observations may be used to As we shall see later in this study, appeals to the “logically necessary” nature of Universal Grammar have become more common under the Minimalist Program. 147 Oenbring / 143 test postulated rules, but only rules, not observations, serve as confirming or refuting instances for conditions on rules. This is a simple point of logic, often overlooked. To support or refute a proposed condition, it does not suffice to cite examples of grammatical or ungrammatical constructions from some language or other informant judgments or observed phenomena. The empirical facts do indeed bear on the correctness of a theory of conditions on rules, but only indirectly, through the medium of proposed rule systems that do or do not conform to the conditions. … The atomistic approach of much linguistic work, citing phenomena and generalizations from a variety of languages but not proposing partial rule systems that conform to some proposed theory of UG, whatever its value, is simply not very helpful in the present context. (21) As this quote suggests, what is important to Chomsky is now “rules” not “observed phenomena.” Moreover, “to support or refute a proposed condition, it does not suffice to cite examples of grammatical or ungrammatical constructions.” In effect what Chomsky is claiming is that supposed counter-examples to a model are not of interest unless they propose their own elegant theory that can replace the previous theory. This is, of course, “a simple point of logic.” Recall, however, that in the early days of generative grammar, Chomsky and his followers suggested that what distinguished generative grammar from the postBloomfieldian program was that it, unlike the post-Bloomfieldian linguistics, makes explicit theoretical claims about language that can be refuted with counterevidence. Oenbring / 144 Compare the above quote from Essays on Form with the following passage from SPE, published a mere nine years before: One of the best reason for presenting a theory of a particular language in the precise form of a generative grammar, or for presenting a hypothesis concerning general linguistic theory in very explicit terms, is that only such precise and explicit formulation can lead to the discovery of serious inadequacies and to and understanding of how they can be remedied. In contrast, a system of transcription or terminology, a list of examples, or a rearrangement of the data in a corpus is not ‘refutable’ by evidence … It is just for this reason that such exercises are of very limited interest for linguistics as a field of rational inquiry. (ix) Whereas post-Bloomfieldian linguistics is merely a “rearrangement of the data” that is not “‘refutable’ by evidence,” generative grammar, according to SPE, offers “precise and explicit formulation” that “can lead to the discovery of serious inadequacies.” This is a clear case of Chomsky changing the rules in the middle of the game. In effect, what Chomsky was offering in his later deemphasizing of potential for falsification as criterion was a rhetorical buffer. With generative grammar the guiding paradigm at several prominent institutions (and numerous careers wagered on the reality of generative descriptions), generative grammarians could now claim that other theories must be determined based on broader criteria, rather than their seeming empirical adequacy. What’s more, by placing more and more emphasis on the need for elegance in models rather than on the empirical adequacy of models (e.g., X-bar syntax: elegant, but not falsifiable), with ratings of elegance relying largely upon the authority of the Oenbring / 145 researcher for their success, Chomsky, due in large part to his own authority, has been able to assure the continuity of the community of generative grammarians; they follow him. The Extended Standard Theory and Autonomous Syntax I have suggested the notion of autonomous syntax became both an implicit ideology and an explicitly-stated organizing thesis/ point of identity for generative grammarians under EST. This, needless to say, deserves more thorough explanation. Broadly stated, the thesis of autonomous syntax states that the proper object of the study of human language is the interaction of abstract elements among hierarchic syntactic trees, with no little to no attention paid to any of the following: the function for which the language is being used; the specific thematic functions or meaning of the elements within the syntactic strings; the social situation in which the language is being used; register, social variation, or genre; how the elements of the string relate to other elements in the discourse; the mind’s conceptual processing of sentences; or even frequencies of usage of particular terms or strings of syntax. The goal of autonomous syntax is — as Searle states in his hilariously-titled review of Chomsky’s 1975 book Reflections on Language “The Rules of the Language Game”148 — to describe language without “reference to meaning or to function or any other non-syntactical notion: all the rules of syntax of all natural languages are in this sense formal” (1119). Searle is, for certain, invoking the later Wittgenstein’s notion of language games here. One also gets the sense of hustle from the language game. 148 Oenbring / 146 Recall that the first chapter of Syntactic Structures is entitled “The Autonomy of Grammar,” and its basic function is to emphasize that grammatical judgments of wellformedness are distinct from what would later be called pragmatic judgments of wellformedness. That is to say, the notion of autonomous syntax has played a real role in the legitimating of generative syntax as a unique field of inquiry since near the beginning. In early days of generative grammar, however, Chomsky had not yet extensively articulated these externalities to ‘scientific’ linguistics mentioned above. Nor had he explicitly formulated autonomous syntax as an organizing thesis. (What’s more, Chomsky did not yet have the authority to exclude these other interests as non-scientific.) With “Remarks” and other early EST works hollowing out the organizing ideals of the Aspects program, what seemed to be left increasingly was syntax for the sake of syntax. At the same time, the model was becoming, as I have explained, increasingly abstract, seemingly immune to refutation, and inaccessible to outsiders. This led to revolt. Indeed, by many accounts the mid-seventies were a nadir in Chomsky’s prestige (see, for example, Searle’s review for an example of these sorts of critiques). The notion of autonomous syntax, as explained above, is difficult to defend, and Chomsky himself has had to deftly maneuver around it. While the notion of autonomous syntax was clearly present implicitly in earlier versions of generative grammar, under EST Chomsky offered up autonomous syntax as an organizing thesis and point of identity for generative grammarians. For example, in the paper “Questions of Form and Interpretation,” originally delivered at the 1974 Linguistic Society of America Conference, later reprinted in Essays on Form and Interpretation, Chomsky suggests that Oenbring / 147 “one might propose a ‘thesis of autonomy of formal grammar’ of varying degrees of strength” (42).149 Similarly, Chomsky directly states in “Conditions on Rules of Grammar” that “implicit in this presentation is a certain version of the ‘thesis of autonomy of syntax’ (cf. Chomsky [1975a])” (166). By explicitly formulating and promoting notions of autonomous syntax, Chomsky was, in effect, offering a guiding idea for his followers to use to distinguish us from them. Despite its clearly ideological nature,150 the notion of autonomous syntax has been taken up by many generative grammarians within the fold; autonomous syntax has become a rallying point for many generative grammarians, with autonomous syntax understood as the backbone of ‘scientific’ autonomous linguistics (see, for example, Newmeyer’s The Politics of Linguistics). Although it has become an operating principle and point of identity for many generative grammarians, Chomsky has, however, routinely disavowed the notion of autonomous syntax since the mid-seventies.151 (This is no doubt due in part to the clearly ideological and indefensible nature of a pure autonomy thesis.) For example, in the introduction to 1977’s LSLT, Chomsky suggests that “thesis of ‘autonomy of syntax’ ... is allegedly in dispute, but the thesis itself is rarely formulated” (21). More recently, Chomsky has denied that he ever supported the notion of autonomous syntax. Barsky (1997), for example, cites personal correspondence from Chomsky in which Chomsky claims that “it’s a logical impossibility for Searle, or In the same essay, however, Chomsky makes it clear that “no one … has ever doubted” that there exist “highly systematic connections” between form and meaning. 150 By ideological here I mean driven by a mathematical/scientific ideology of syntax. 151 In this regard, one might say that Chomsky is leaving those who support the autonomy thesis as a point of disciplinary identity high and dry. 149 Oenbring / 148 anyone, to differ with my ‘thesis of the “autonomy of syntax,”’ because I’ve never held any such thesis. There is a very large ‘debate’ about it, with many people attacking the thesis (but without telling us what it is) and no one defending it, surely not me, because I have no idea what it is” (cited in Barksy [1997]; personal correspondence 31 Mar. 1995). One might, of course, read this as an example a hegemonic cultural formation denying that it has an undergirding ideology — or even that it has power. Principles and Parameters: The Second Revolution By many accounts, Chomsky was on the ropes in the late seventies. Indeed, the seventies had seen the emergence of a number of schools of syntactic analysis questioning the foundations of Chomskyan generative grammar. Theories developed questioning transformations (Gazdar et al.’s generalized phrase structure grammar), the assumed homogeneity of linguistic communities (sociolinguistics),152 and the lack of attention to the functional/pragmatic side of syntax (Dik’s functional grammar and Halliday et al.’s systemic functional grammar). And there were those bitter disenfranchised generative semanticists still hanging around. What’s more, the later extended standard theory presented in works like 1973’s “Conditions on Transformations” and his 1977’s “Filters and Control” (with Howard Lasnik) was highly theory-internal, technical, and less popular among generative linguists than earlier incarnations of Chomsky’s work. For certain, in part Chomsky’s problems with the mature extended standard theory were rhetorical. “Conditions” — and even more 152 Of course, sociolinguistics did not originate in the seventies, but certainly became a more important player then (see, for example, Labov [1966]). Oenbring / 149 Chomsky’s last publication in EST, 1980’s “On Binding” — are largely a laundry list of abstract, technical, and specifically-formulated conditions with examples coming largely from English. What Chomsky needed was another revolution, and he, no surprise, was able to produce one. What Chomsky produced was the framework he first called GovernmentBinding but has since relabeled Principles and Parameters (what I will refer to as a whole as GB/P and P). The ‘revolutionary’ text largely responsible for this shift is Chomsky’s 1981 book Lectures on Government and Binding, a text to which the same caveats apply as those I have suggested in my analysis of Chomsky’s other revolutionary texts. The research program initiated by Lectures, GB/P and P, quickly became — no doubt due in part to its undergirding rhetoric — the dominant organizing approach among generative grammarians. Although GB/P and P work continues to this day, many generative syntacticians have refocused their work under the so-called ‘economy’ constraints on Chomsky’s Minimalist Program. Due to the success of Lectures (and due to the emphasis that Chomsky himself has placed on GB/P and P), the shift initiated by Lectures is sometimes referred to as the ‘second Chomskyan revolution’. Nevertheless, Lectures has been, by any account, a rhetorical success, a rhetorical success that I shall attempt to account for in the following pages. Decidedly cross- and trans-linguistic in focus, the GB/P and P approach seeks, in theory, to account for the syntactic complexity of all human languages by uncovering both universal principles (i.e., constraints on syntactic construction shared by all human languages) and language-specific parameters, usually understood as binaries. Note this Oenbring / 150 clear (read: rhetorical) binary between principles and parameters. The theory of language acquisition promoted by GB/P and P can be imagined as follows: while any human child can, at birth, learn any human language, the child’s being surrounded with their native tongue causes a series of binary switches to be set in the child’s brain producing the grammar of their native tongue. Chomsky suggests in Lectures that: Each of the systems of [language] has associated with it certain parameters, which are set in terms of data presented to the person acquiring a particular language. The grammar of a language can be regarded as a particular set of values for these parameters, while the overall system of rules, principles, and parameters is UG, which we may to take to be one element of the human biological endowment, namely, the “language faculty.” (7) Note the clear focus on accounting for the differences between human languages and on the acquisition of language in the above quote. Indeed, the framework proposed by Lectures succeeded no doubt in large part due to the fact that it offered a clearly formulated framework for accounting for syntactic patterns in different languages; it gave generative grammarians an institutionalized framework to apply to other languages.153 Lectures, furthermore, continued the trajectory began with work in later EST of actually giving examples from languages other than English.154 Chomsky claims that “study of closely related languages that differ in some clustering of properties is particularly valuable for the opportunities it affords to identify and clarify the parameters of UG that permit a range of variation in the proposed principles” (6). 154 Indeed, prior to late EST, Chomsky’s only work offering any examples in a language other than English was Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew (his master’s essay). 153 Oenbring / 151 Although Chomsky had claimed that generative grammar had clear implications for the study of language acquisition since the sixties, GB/P and P offered the first clear model within generative grammar for (at least in theory) accounting for how children learn different languages. This emphasis has secured Chomsky’s place within the field of language acquisition. (Indeed, the 2004 reader First Language Acquisition: the Essential Readings includes three separate essays by Chomsky.) Perhaps the clearest example of one of these so-called parameters is the so-called pro-drop parameter relating to whether languages require phonetically-realized personal pronouns. The pro-drop example, originally stemming from Rizzi (1980), is invoked by Chomksy’s Lectures and many other introductions to the principles and parameters theory no doubt for its seeming ease and elegance of explanation. (In this regard, I am borrowing a rhetorical maneuver from Chomsky in using pro-drop as my example of a parameter.) Basically, the pro-drop parameter means this: whereas in English to say the sentence I am hungry, one must say the I, in languages like Spanish and Italian, the personal pronoun is not required in normal day-to-day speech (thus, tengo hambre is sufficient). Hence, we can say that Italian and Spanish allow pro-drop, but English doesn’t. Of course, as one can imagine, there seem to be innumerable parameters in different human languages. Nevertheless, it is a fairly standard convention in contemporary research articles in generative grammar to propose one or more of these parameters. 155 155 The Principles and Parameters approach has, however, run into serious problems in the past decades. The most serious problem with the Principles and Parameters approach has been the astronomical number of possible parameters suggested by syntactic theorists. As Lightfoot (1999) Oenbring / 152 Building a historical narrative for the emergence of the theory he is promoting, Chomsky suggests in Lectures that “in early work in generative grammar it was assumed, as in traditional grammar, that there are rules, such as ‘passive,’ ‘relativization,’ ‘question-formation,’ etc. … In subsequent work … these ‘rules’ are decomposed into the more fundamental elements of the subsystems of rules and principles” (7). Claiming the Prague school phonologists as venerable precursors, Chomsky argues that the move that he is endorsing “is reminiscent of the move from phonemes to features in the phonology of the Prague school, though in the present case the ‘features’ (e.g., the principles of Case, government and binding theory) are considerably more abstract” (7). This time, however, Chomsky’s claimed lineage from a venerable precursor is accurate; Chomsky is correct to suggest that his interest in abstract features reflect concerns stemming from Prague school phonology. Whereas the Conditions framework was mired in problems attempting to create specifically-formulated rules that could stand up to even a meager amount of intra and inter-linguistic testing, GB/ P and P moved the entire system into a higher order of abstraction, thereby removing the need to offer specifically-formulated rules and conditions. Unlike in the Conditions framework, where specific rules are postulated that define possible projections and movements, the GB/ P and P framework does not see the need to offer specific, presumably refutable, rules. This is due to the claimed “logically notes, if, indeed, parameters are binaries, postulating a mere 33 parameters would generate approx 8.6 billion potential human languages — more than the total number of people on the planet (259). This raises the question: how can a system that generates more possible languages than there are people on the planet in any way be said to offer constraints on human languages and a child’s learning thereof? Lightfoot is, moreover, not optimistic that all the syntactic complexities of all human languages could ever be accounted for in 30-40 parameters. Oenbring / 153 necessary” nature of a principled and mathematically-elegant UG. That is to say, the grammars of particular languages under GB/P and P in and of themselves are no longer of particular interest (those grammars being in themselves merely the residue of history156), with the goal being the pursuit of vaguely-defined principles (and parameters) of language. Like later EST, the framework articulated by Lectures is highly technical and rather abstract. GB/P and P keeps much of the technical apparatus of later EST, including all of the following elements: the notions of logical form, X-bar theory, Moveα, COMP, and numerous phonetically null elements like PRO. Chomsky’s prose follows later EST in its extensive use of Greek letters and intialisms. The following passage from Lectures serves as a good example: Base rules generate D-structures (deep structures) through insertion of lexical items into structures generated by [the categorical component of the syntax], in accordance with their feature structure. These are mapped to S-structure by the rule Move-α, leaving traces coindexed with their antecedents; this rule constitutes the transformational component (iib), and may also appear in the PF- and LFcomponents. Thus the syntax generates Structures which are assigned PF- and LFrepresentations” (5) As this quote suggests, Chomsky reintroduces and relabels the notions deep structure and surface structure in Lectures, this time calling them D-structures and S-structures (no doubt to avoid reliving the contentious debates over notions of deep structure). Indeed, Chomsky notes in Lectures that “existing languages are a small and in part accidental sample of possible human languages” (1). 156 Oenbring / 154 While Lectures keeps much of the technical apparatus of the mature extended standard theory, Chomsky makes clear that he is promoting a distinct system; he makes it clear that the current system entails a break from EST.157 Accordingly, Chomsky uses visionary language in the world creation pages of Lectures. Chomsky, for example, states that “I think that we are, in fact, beginning to approach a grasp of certain basic principles of grammar at what may be the appropriate level of abstraction” (2). One of these notions at “the appropriate level of abstraction” that Chomsky introduces is the divide between core grammar and marked periphery, a dichotomy that he drew in his 1980 essay first presenting the notion of binding theory “On Binding.” The end result, Chomsky claims, is a model that is an “idealized – but not unrealistic – theory of language acquisition” (8). As I have suggested, Chomsky’s later EST articles are somewhat rhetorically confused, consisting largely of laundry lists of abstract conditions. This is not the case with Lectures. Chomsky in Lectures articulates a tight set of foundational assumptions for GB/P and P, even going so far as to present what he claims to be the unique components of the theory in list form. Chomsky lists the following “subcomponents of the rule system”: (1) (i) lexicon (ii) syntax (a) Categorical component (b) Transformational component (iii) PF-component 157 As I suggest later, Chomsky does much of this through his negotiation of the labels he uses for the various theories. Oenbring / 155 (iv) LF-component (5) And the following “subsystems of principles” on the same page: (2) (i) bounding theory (ii) government theory (iii) θ-theory (iv) binding theory (v) case theory (vi) control theory (5) Indeed, Chomsky makes clear the specific components of the system he is trying to promote in Lectures. As a whole Chomsky seems much more confident in Lectures than he is in the early texts of EST to claim as his prerogative the authority to move the theory according to own intuitions. With the field having been through Chomsky’s uprooting of the assumptions of the standard theory only to replace them with the assumptions of the extended standard theory — with the field having been through a rupture ritual — all Chomsky seemingly needed to do was play his rupture card. (Of course, this is hyperbole to some extent. However, it is clear the Chomsky is less cautious in his rhetorical construction of the GB/P and P revolution than he was in his movement from the standard theory to the extended standard theory.) Chomsky’s rhetorical maneuvers in his attempts to foment and shore up what became the GB/ P and P revolution in Lectures and later works is what I shall analyze in the coming paragraphs. Oenbring / 156 The Rhetorical Construction of the GB/P and P Revolution Lectures on Government and Binding begins with a dual-barreled claim by Chomsky that he is the ultimate origin of the theories presented in the book, coupled with an acknowledgment of the influence of other scholars. Chomsky states on the first page of the preface that: The material that follows is based on lectures I gave at the GLOW158 conference and workshop held at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa in April 1979. The material was then reworked in the course lectures at MIT in 1979-80, where I was fortunate to have the participation of a number of visitors from other institutions in the U.S. and Europe … The material presented here borrows extensively from recent and current work in ways that will not be adequately indicated; specifically, from the work of linguists of the GLOW circle who have created research centers of such remarkable vitality and productivity in France, the Netherlands, Italy and elsewhere. (vi, emphasis added) Chomsky’s work to pair an authorship claim with a claim that the book “borrows extensively from recent and current work” is, no doubt, done to build the appearance of consensus; Chomsky claims that the findings presented in the book are accepted by a broad scholarly community in order to undergird the novel set of theoretical constructs presented in the book. What’s more, by suggesting that the influence of other scholars “will not be adequately indicated,” Chomsky is engaging in a clear sleight of hand; Chomsky is suggesting that the reader should infer that other scholars support the 158 Generative Linguistics in the Old World Oenbring / 157 findings that he reports in the text even if he does not offer a source to support his claims.159 In the beginning of first main body chapter “Outline of the Theory of Core Grammar,” Chomsky avoids using the term extended standard theory as a landmark for the would-be revolution he is crafting.160 However, Chomsky suggests that the framework presented in the book developed out of Reflections on Language (1975) and Essays on Form and Interpretation (1977) (the two most important texts of later EST). Specifically, Chomsky states that: I will assume the general framework presented in Chomsky (1975; 1977a,b; 1980b) and work cited there. A more extensive discussion of certain of the more technical notions appears in my paper “On Binding” (Chomsky, 1980a; henceforth, OB). … It is based on certain principles that were in part implicit in this earlier work, but that were not given in the form that I will develop here. In the course of this discussion, I will consider a number of conceptual and empirical problems that arise in a theory of the OB type and will suggest a somewhat different approach that assigns a more central role to the notion of government; let us call the alternative approach that will be developed here a “governmentbinding (GB) theory” for expository purposes. (1) What’s more, as the book emphasizes cross-linguistic work, Chomsky’s deference to European scholars makes sense; it is in his best interest to have the Europeans on board with his framework. 160 Chomsky does, however, use the term extended standard theory later in the first chapter, suggesting that “the approaches that seem to me most promising fall within the general framework of the so-called ‘Extended Standard Theory’” (4). 159 Oenbring / 158 As we seen in this quote, Chomsky emphasizes continuity of the model presented in Lectures with four texts that themselves claimed to be part of the EST, all while avoiding using the notion extended standard theory. At several points in the text, Chomsky uses his 1980 paper “On Binding” as both a place to define the program of “governmentbinding” against and as a neutral landmark in the development of the theory. 161 (Also note that Chomsky in this quote first refers to a government-binding theory rather than just government-binding theory. [Recall that this is essentially the same way he introduced the notion of the standard theory, with its function being a modesty topos.]) Within five years after the publication of Lectures, Chomsky published two rather short texts laying out sets of specific technical assumptions for the GB/P and P program: 1982’s Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding and 1986’s Barriers.162 Although less frequently cited than Lectures, the rhetorical purpose of these texts is clear: to outline the concepts of a new framework in a much clearer and more concise manner than Lectures. While Barriers includes more novel material, the goal of both texts is clearly to lay out and institutionalize the precise assumptions and metalanguage of the GB/P and P framework. As I have demonstrated, it is clearly important to Chomsky to manage the names of theories. Accordingly, Chomsky states on the first page of Some Concepts that: I would like to sketch some features of an approach to linguistic theory that has been slowly coming into focus in the past few years and that has considerable Chomsky’s work to define the program he is presenting against a not-so-clearly important work is, of course, reminiscent of rhetorical maneuvers he engaged in Syntactic Structures. 162 Similarly, 1966’s Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar seems designed to summarize goals and methods of Chomsky’s mid-60s methods for an audience of linguists. 161 Oenbring / 159 promise, I believe. Because of the crucial roles played by the notions of government and binding, the approach is sometimes called government-binding (GB) theory. I will refer to it by that name here, though it develops directly and without a radical break from earlier work in transformational generative grammar, in particular from research that falls within the framework of the Extended Standard Theory (EST). (3) As this quote suggests, Chomsky attempts to solidify the theories of language promoted by Lectures under the label government-binding theory, while still emphasizing the program’s continuity with EST. Some Concepts then overviews the rule systems and systems of principles presented in Lectures with only some minor tinkering. Identity Work and the GB/P and P Revolution Chomsky’s original title for GB/P and P “government-binding” foregrounded a specific, tight set of interactions within hierarchical syntactic trees: the relations of government and binding.163 (One could, of course, write a whole paper on the authoritarian notions built into some terminology in generative grammar, but that is outside of the scope of this study.) By 1986, however, Chomsky would rename the program started with Lectures ‘Principles and Parameters’, with the notion of principles and parameters being a much more vaguely-defined yet much more alluring notion. Chomsky states, for example, in Barriers that “I will assume here the 'principles and 163 Simplified to its core, government can be understood as a position of mutual dominance (more technically stated mutual c-command) of elements in syntactic trees. Similarly, binding can be defined as non-mutual dominance of coindexed elements (like pronouns and their antecedents). Oenbring / 160 parameters’ approach to linguistic theory outlined in Chomsky 1981 and related work” (2). That is to say, Chomsky shifts the label for the GB/P and P program from a tight, distinct set of relationships, to a theory of much broader scope. (In fact, by 1991 Chomsky would claim that “such terms as ‘government-binding theory’ should be abandoned [and] should never have been used in the first place” [3]).164 Chomsky’s ex post facto emphasis on what proved to be the boldest and most captivating element of the theory presented in Lectures is, it seems, a rhetorical maneuver, a rhetorical maneuver meant to secure the place of GB/P and P framework as the overarching framework that linguists operate under. That is to say, with other linguists inspired by his work also searching for principles and parameters, Chomsky’s emphasis on the principles and parameters dichotomy in effect interpolated those linguists’ work under his own program. In this regard, Chomsky’s after the fact assertion of the importance principles and parameters as the core claim of the GB/P and P theory is analogous to his attempts in the late sixties to emphasize the central place of the notion of deep structure in the Aspects model; in each case he attempted to place emphasis on bold and captivating notions, notions that were quickly becoming the lynchpins of the disciplinary imagination of generative studies at the time. The end result of these Chomsky’s suggestion here is part of a broader suggestion that linguists should avoid expansive theory labeling. As Chomsky makes clear, what catalyzes him to make this suggestion is his discomfort with the notion of ‘Chomskyan linguistics’ (indeed, the name of the volume the piece is printed in is entitled The Chomskyan Turn); Chomsky is attempting to normalize generative inquiry: to make it unauthored. Nevertheless, Chomsky’s suggestion seems largely disingenuous. After all, a mere two years later Chomsky would attempt to foment a change to the Minimalist Program. It is, furthermore, worth noting that the term he critiques is governmentbinding and not principles and parameters. 164 Oenbring / 161 maneuvers was the same: Chomsky built boundaries on the intellectual community of generative linguists more or less associated with his own name and person. Conclusion Chomsky’s shifting genealogies — his shifting landmarks of identity — for the field of linguistics at the beginning of his books must each be recognized as strategic, rhetorical formulations meant to mould the horizon of identity for the field of generative grammar (and linguistics as a whole). As I have demonstrated in this chapter, early in his revolutions Chomsky has started off by claiming the authority of established practice and tradition (i.e., pre-Bloomfieldian precursors, the Aspects model, and the Extended Standard Theory), only to later shift up temporarily the landmarks he uses in his genealogies of linguistic theory once he had led the field to follow him down a line of inquiry. That is to say, Chomsky has attempted to claim continuity before he has claimed rupture. These later shifts forward in the horizon of identity for the field serve important rhetorical purposes; they create the impression of progress in the field all while reinscribing Chomsky’s place as the core theorist in the discipline. (Indeed, we should not underestimate the effects of Chomsky’s work to manage what texts and scholars the field traces its identity back to. This includes spending a not insignificant among of time managing the names [read: not the core methods] of the theory programs that linguists operate under.) As I have shown, the time and care that Chomsky has placed in crafting each of his revolutions has decreased over time; he has become increasingly bold in his use of his revolution cards. Whereas the first Chomskyan revolution took place over a decade Oenbring / 162 (from the mid fifties to the mid sixties) and the second took place over approximately half that time (from the late sixties to the early seventies), the third was catalyzed largely by a single book. What’s more, although in each sub-revolution Chomsky has proposed new technical models, the most important elements of these sub-revolutions have been Chomsky’s rhetorical manipulations of large-scale disciplinary identity. As I have noted, in the sixties Chomsky proposed mentalism, rationalism, intuitionism, and the notion of deep structure as points of identity to help linguists distinguish between generative grammar and post-Bloomfieldian theories. In the seventies he proposed autonomous syntax as a way to distinguish between his theories and other uninteresting or nonscientific theories like generative semanticists and sociolinguistics. In the eighties he proposed the dichotomy between principles and parameters as yet another organizing thesis giving linguists a sense of identity and excluding other theories (as well as a way to deal with language acquisition in generative grammar). Identity holds academic fields together, and by managing the disciplinary identity of linguistics, Chomsky has over the past several decades both periodically and consistently renewed his dominance of the field. Oenbring / 163 Chapter 4: Noam Chomsky: Serial Revolutionary Introduction Revolution is the master plot of linguistic history, what gives sense to our work and careers, what makes it worth getting out of bed in the morning. John Joseph, “The Structure of Linguistic Revolutions,” 1995 A Brief Introduction In the previous two chapters I presented an extensive, but by no means comprehensive, rhetorical history of generative grammar from its conception to the Principles and Parameters framework, paying special attention to how Chomsky has rhetorically created each of his successive (at least rhetorical) revolutions in the study of human language. In this chapter, I present several analyses that, although related to the organizing themes of the previous chapter two chapters, did not fit into the specific narrative presented in chapters two and three (the narrative presented there already being plenty long). In this chapter I analyze a handful of distinct rhetorical strategies that Chomsky has used that have helped him achieve these successive rhetorical revolutions; in this chapter I analyze several distinct approaches that Chomsky has invoked that have helped him live the life of a serial revolutionary.165 My analyses in this chapter include: how Chomsky and his followers have used the notion of Kuhnian scientific revolutions in 165 Serial Revolutionary is a term I have borrowed from Koerner (2002) and Joseph (1995). Oenbring / 164 order to support their own self-serving history of the discipline of linguistics;166 how Chomsky’s alluring terminology (i.e., his status as a phrase maker) has served to reinforce his place in the field; and finally, but importantly, how Chomsky’s status as perhaps the most famous radical public intellectual has helped him craft a revolutionary ethos, reinforcing his person as point of identity for generative grammarians and linguists as a whole. Revolutionary Historiography and Boundary Work Linguistic theory is concerned with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogenous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance. Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax Historiography is primarily concerned with an ideal Bloomfieldian, in a completely homogenous scientific community, who embodies its implicit model perfectly, unaffected by such irrelevant conditions as historical limitations, shifts of attention 166 As I argued in the previous chapter, Chomsky and his followers have routinely suggested that Chomsky’s work was totally distinct from the ruling post-Bloomfieldians. Chomsky and his followers did this in order to rhetorically create the existence of a break, a seeming epistemological rupture (a tradition begins with Lees’ review of Syntactic Structures). The object of this chapter is similar, but is not specifically on how Chomsky and his followers have misrepresented the post-Bloomfieldian program. In this chapter, I instead focus on how Chomsky and his followers have told the story of the history of the discipline of linguistics, and how they have strategically invoked the concept of Kuhnian scientific revolutions in order to legitimate their research program as scientific, to the exclusion of others. Oenbring / 165 and interest, and personality (random or characteristic), in applying his knowledge of the model in actual practice. Or so it sometimes seems. Hymes and Fought, American Structuralism The historiography of the dramatic shift in the disciplinary identity of linguistics that Chomsky caused in the fifties and sixties and the later changes of programs that Chomsky has sponsored has been inextricably linked with Thomas Kuhn’s notion of scientific revolutions — a notion brought into academic consciousness by Kuhn’s 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.167 While Kuhn did not invent the notion of scientific revolutions,168 his book, published on the cusp of the revolutionary fervor of the mid to late sixties, must be recognized as remarkably successful, both in academic and popular contexts. Many commentators have over the years had much to say over whether the notion of Kuhnian revolutions really can apply in the field of linguistics.169 Those works that have specifically commented on whether Chomsky’s work has led to a scientific revolution can be divided into three broad camps: the propagandistic, presenting a 167 In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn describes paradigms as the sets of accepted truths and practices that organize scientific fields’ means of collecting and making meaning out of the world. Whenever the available facts cannot support the prevailing assumptions, the ruling paradigm reconstitutes itself in another form. The changes of paradigms, or revolutions, that Kuhn describes are, of course, well-known and now canonical (for example, the paradigm of Copernican cosmology; the paradigm of Newtonian physics). 168 Many commentators link the notion of scientific revolutions to Kant’s claim that his thought had undergone a “Copernican Revolution.” In fact, many scholars trace the spread of the notion of ‘revolution’ itself to Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus (Cohen [1985]). 169 See, for example, Hymes’ Studies in the History of Linguistics: Traditions and Paradigms and Grotsch’s book with a wonderful German title Sprachwissenschaftgeschichtsschreibung, a text that, unfortunately, only deals a minor amount with post-1957 developments. Oenbring / 166 revolutionary narrative (see, for example, Smith and Wilson [1979]; Newmeyer [1980 (1986)], [1986b]; Searle [1972]170; and several of Chomsky’s own statements [e.g., The Generative Enterprise Revisited]); accounts directly critical of the Chomskyan revolutionary narrative (see, for example, Antilla [1974]; Hymes [1974]; and Murray [1980] and [1994]); and more neutral analyses of how the concept of revolution as it relates to the ascendance of generative grammar has worked in linguistic historiography. (Indeed, the preeminent historian of linguistics, E.F.K. Koerner, a scholar whose work has done much to uphold the ideal of unbiased disciplinary history, has devoted a number of publications to analyzing the concept of revolution and its place in the historiography of generative grammar [see, for example, (1978); (1989); (1996); and (2002)].)171 Although Chomsky and his followers have often critiqued the specifics of Kuhnian historiography172 and its relevance in linguistics, they have nevertheless invoked the notion of disciplinary revolutions á là Kuhn in order to provide a coherent conceptual frame to present the ascendance of their field. The rhetorical value of presenting the history of their field as a series of scientific revolutions is clear. As Hymes (1974), commenting on the first revolution, states, “the attractiveness of Kuhn’s notion undoubtedly is due to the fact … that it summarizes, and dignifies, a genuine sense of the Searle, however, quickly became a staunch critic of generative grammar and Chomsky’s place within the school. 171 While critical historians such as Murray as well as pure historians such as Koerner have expressed a healthy skepticism of the self-serving notion of revolution promoted by Chomskyans, both the critical historians and the pure historians neglect to recognize in their analyses that the notion of revolution has tied itself inextricably with the disciplinary identity generative grammar — even if that revolution is merely an illusion. That is to say, it doesn’t matter if Chomsky’s revolution has fulfilled the requirements of a Kuhnian revolution for it to be a genuine revolution; the Chomskyan revolution is a legitimate social fact whether one likes it or not. 172 See, for example, Chomsky’s take on Kuhnian revolutions in the interview material reproduced in Haley and Lunsford’s Noam Chomsky (130). 170 Oenbring / 167 recent past” (26). However, Chomsky and his followers have emphasized the revolutionary status of only those models sponsored by Chomsky that have been most successful in reframing the disciplinary identity of linguistics; generative grammarians have carefully played their revolution cards when telling the history of generative grammar. An important rhetorical effect of Chomsky’s revolutionary historiography is to construct generative grammar as ‘scientific’ and post-Bloomfieldian linguistics as ‘nonscientific’. Indeed, as Hymes and Fought note, “current images of the history of American Structuralism serve boundary maintenance, legitimating some concerns and contributions, and excluding others” (4, emphasis added).173 What’s more, framing the history of generative grammar as a series of alluring Kuhnian revolutions is part and parcel of what critics of generative grammar have called the “eclipsing stance.”174 As I have already demonstrated, Chomsky has done much to present his own version of the history of linguistics. (In fact, although the book is not taken seriously by contemporary historians of linguistics, many historians of linguistics nevertheless Ryckman magisterial summarizes all of this in the introduction to his “Method and Theory in Harris’s Grammar of Information.” Specifically Ryckman states that: For more than a quarter century, the recent history of linguistics has featured a dramatic narrative relating how, beginning in the early 1960s, structuralism, as a viable research program, was rapidly eclipsed by the ‘revolution’ — in the classically Kuhnian sense of paradigm shift – of generative grammar. It appears irrelevant that American structuralism was never a paradigm in Kuhn’s sense — a unified or even consistent program of methods, problems, goals or approaches … But the emphatic portrayal of a ‘scientific revolution’ has an obvious legitimating function in a discipline historically occupying nebulous and disputed turf abutting on the humanities, the natural sciences, and the natural sciences. (Ryckman 19) As Ryckman notes, the emphatic portrayal of a scientific revolution has a “legitimating function” for linguists. 174 See, for example, Koerner (2002) (following Voegelin and Voegelin [1963]) and Hockett (1987: 1). 173 Oenbring / 168 recognize Chomsky’s Cartesian Linguistics as the text that provided much of the impetus for the study of the history of linguistics.) Most commonly, when Chomsky tells the story of the early history of generative grammar (see, for example, Chomsky [1968: 338]; [1975: 11]; [1977: 34]; and [1991]), he suggests the existence of profound differences between his work and the work of the post-Bloomfieldians, most notably Harris (a claim challenged by, among others, Matthews [1993]). That is to say, he attempts to frame the approaches he has sponsored as more novel and unique than they truly were. For example, in a 1958 paper (i.e., a mere year after Syntactic Structures) presented at the Third Texas Conference of Problems of Linguistics Analysis in English “A Transformational Approach to Syntax,”175 a paper that is not a purely historical account, Chomsky starts off by claiming that his methods developed directly out of Harris’, but later in the paper explains the important differences between his theories and those of the post-Bloomfieldians. That is to say, as elsewhere, Chomsky claims continuity before he claims rupture. (It is interesting that Chomsky would so early in his career attempt to develop a narrative describing the origin his theories.) In the introduction to his massive 1975 book The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (the introduction, written in 1973, reflects on the origin of his theories and the history of the study, completed in 1955 but not published until twenty years later), Chomsky is not afraid to be much bolder in his proclamations regarding the novelty of his theories than he is in the 1958 paper. Deploying a typical host of terminology and points of identity that he has sponsored (e.g., “the initial state of the organism” [13]), Interestingly, “A Tranformational Approach to Syntax” was reprinted a mere ten years later in a volume of papers entitled Classics in Linguistics. 175 Oenbring / 169 Chomsky, for example, frames his theories vis-à-vis the post-Bloomfieldians using the dichotomy between empiricism and rationalism (13). Having already won his original revolution and with the linguistics wars wrapping up, Chomsky isn’t afraid to be much bolder than he was in 1958. Chomsky, for example, states that: It became increasingly clear to me that the methodological limitation to procedures based on substitution, matching, and similar ‘taxonomic’ operations was arbitrary and unwarranted. One might approach the problem of projecting a corpus to a language of grammatical sentences in an entirely different way, with a procedure for evaluating a completed system of categories rather than a procedure for constructing these categories step by step by taxonomic methods. (31, emphasis added) What’s more, while Chomsky recognizes in the introduction to the book that The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory lacks the ‘revolutionary’ mentalism of Current Issues and Aspects — suggesting that raising the issue in the mid-fifties would have been “too audacious”(35), he nevertheless reads mentalism (what he calls the “psychological analogue” [35]) back onto LSLT. Indeed, since the seventies, Chomsky has routinely told the story of his ‘conversion’ away from Harris-style discovery procedures (a notion that Harris did not use to describe his own work) as a moment of epiphany. According to Chomsky, his conversion occurred on a boat “mid-Atlantic, aided by a bout of seasicknesss, on a rickety tub that was listing noticeably – it had been sunk by the Germans and now as making its first voyage after having been salvaged” (1979: 131). This is an undeniably Oenbring / 170 attractive story and has been reproduced by several hagiographers and historians of linguistics (see, for example, Haley and Lunsford). (In fact, “An Epiphany at Sea” is the title of the first chapter of the documentary The Mind of Noam Chomsky.) Newmeyer’s (1980 [1986]) book Linguistic Theory in America, a text that has become the ‘official’ history of generative grammar within the paradigm, follows Chomsky’s lead in framing the origin of generative grammar as an epistemological rupture.176 Using a “revolutionary” (1986: 17) rhetoric to describe the ascendance of Chomsky’s early approaches (and locating the revolution largely in Syntactic Structures), Newmeyer clearly engages in a straw man representation of the post-Bloomfieldians; following Chomsky, he presents the group as a largely homogenous and uninspired group of scholars.177 This straw man representation is clearly designed to promote the eclipsing stance — an eclipsing stance that has helped generative grammarians build the revolutionary identity of their program. For a less technical account – one focused specifically on the notions of politics and the autonomy of linguistics – see Newmeyer’s (1986) The Politics of Linguistics. 177 Indeed, one of the only examples of post-Bloomfieldian methods that Newmeyer presents is quite funny in its banality. Newmeyer suggests that: One method was proposed by Harris (1955), who suggested that morph boundaries might be arrived at by a procedure whose first step was the calculation of the number of phonemes that could conceivably follow a sequence of phonemes in a string. Harris used by way of illustration the English sentence he’s clever, phonemicized as /hiyzklevər/. He estimated that 9 phonemes can follow utterance-initial /h/, 14 utterance-initial /hi/, 29 /hiy/, 29 /hiyz/, 11 /hiyzk/, 7 /hiyzkl/, 8 /hiyzkle/ 1 /hiyzklev/, 1 /hiyzklevə/, and 28 /hizklevər/. Harris theorized that morph boundaries followed peaks, that is, that they were to be posited after /y/, /z/, and /r/. … The procedure for classifying morphs into morphemes was similar to that for classifying phones into phonemes. (Newmeyer 8) Providing this example of a method advocated by Zellig Harris, a method that smacks of absurd empiricism, Newmeyer (1986) furthers his project of demarcating the ‘scientific’ approaches of the generative tradition with ‘non-scientific’ approaches. 176 Oenbring / 171 As I have suggested, Chomsky has worked to emphasize the primacy of the Aspects program / standard theory and GB/P and P — specifically, the approaches where he has articulated methods that most directly affected the disciplinary identity of linguistics. In 1979 and 1980 — in what would prove to be the waning days of the extended standard theory (and, by some accounts, a nadir in Chomsky’s prestige), Chomsky participated in a series of interviews that would eventually be published as Noam Chomsky and the Generative Enterprise (1982), a volume that led to a second edition with two more rounds of interviews: 2004’s The Generative Enterprise Revisited. In the 1979/1980 interviews, when asked about Kuhnian revolutions and their relation to the history of science and linguistics, Chomsky is keen to dismiss the idea that his work had led to a revolution in linguistics and is skeptical of the notion of Kuhnian revolutions outside of the hard sciences. Specifically, Chomsky states that “I think [Kuhn’s work] is widely misused outside the natural sciences. The number of real scientific revolutions is extremely small: two maybe three if you press it … To find one outside the natural sciences is hard … My own feeling is that linguistics has not achieved anything like a Galilean revolution” (66). Chomsky’s next sentence is, however, coyly prophetic: “its first revolution is maybe somewhere on the horizon” (66). Indeed, in the Revisited interviews of 2002/2003, more than two decades after the introduction of GB/P and P, and nearing a decade since the advent of the Minimalist Program, Chomsky claims for generative grammar (and obliquely himself) that the Principles and Parameters approach had led to profound insights in the study of the language: a revolution. Specifically, Chomsky Oenbring / 172 states in the 2002/2003 interviews that “the principles and parameters approach which was, I think, the only real revolutionary departure in linguistics maybe in the last several thousand years, much more so than the original work in generative grammar” (148).178 While this proclamation is particularly striking seeing that in the Revisited edition of The Generative Enterprise it takes place in the same volume as his claims that generative grammar had not constituted a revolution, Chomsky has, in fact, since the mid-80s routinely claimed that GB/P and P has constituted a “major conceptual shift” (see, for example, Knowledge of Language).179 Following Chomsky, Newmeyer’s histories of generative grammar (e.g., [1980 (1986)] and [1996]) emphasize the primacy of the Aspects program and GB/P and P, all while seemingly denigrating the importance of EST. For example, Newmeyer (1980 [1986]) clearly suggests the Aspects model to have circumscribed nearly every major development in generative grammar from 1965 on, stating that “EVERY post-Aspects tendency, whether on the side of the angels or on the side of the Devil, found Chomksy’s remarks about the relationship of syntax and semantics in that book vague enough to suit its own purposes” (92). Similarly, describing the development of GB/P and P, Newmeyer (1996) states that: Note that Chomsky locates the revolution in GB/P and P and not the Minimalist Program — a framework that he had been articulating for a decade — but which had not (and has not) been as successful as GB/P and P at winning followers. 179 For example, Chomsky (1991) claims that “this conceptual shift to a principles-and-parameters theory is a very radical departure from the long history of the study of language, much more so than early generative grammar, in the context of the second cognitive revolution, which in many ways revived and clarified ideas that were traditional, if long-forgotten” (23). 178 Oenbring / 173 The publication of the paper ‘On binding’ in 1980 and, much more importantly, the launching of the GB framework in the following year by the publication of the book Lectures on Government and Binding (LGB) represented a quantum leap forward in the development of the ‘Conditions’ framework. These works seemed to unify a great number of seemingly disparate grammatical phenomena in a conceptually simple and elegant overall framework of principles … The effect of LGB was explosive. It seemed as if overnight ten times as many people were working in GB as had been involved in its antecedent conditions framework in the year before its publication. (Newmeyer 63) As this quote suggests, Newmeyer frames the advent of GB/P and P as a “quantum leap forward”: a revolution. While there had been plenty of dissent during EST (indeed, the development of the functionalist school(s) started in earnest in the seventies [see, for example, Dik (1978) and Givón (1979)]), the fact that Chomsky and Newmeyer would later deemphasize the importance of the ‘official’ model of generative grammar in the 1970s seems strange. In fact, in the preface of the second edition of Linguistic Theory in America, Newmeyer (1986) suggests that he wrote the first edition, which was composed in the late seventies, during “the only major lull in syntactic research between the mid 1950s and the present” and that EST was “unappealing” (ix) to many linguists. While EST was the dominant framework within Chomskyan linguistics in the seventies, it did not, however, capture the disciplinary imagination of linguistics in the manner that Syntactic Structures, Aspects, and GB/P and P have. By emphasizing the revolutionary nature of only Chomsky’s Oenbring / 174 models that have captured the disciplinary imagination — models that have inspired the most later scholarship, Chomsky and his followers have worked to crystallize those programs as points of identity for other linguists, thereby interpolating all work inspired by, however tangentially, the standard theory and GB/P and P within the propositions of those respective models. The rhetorical effect of these maneuvers is clear: they reinforce Chomsky’s programs (and his name) as points of disciplinary coherence. Of course, generative grammarians’ claims that the advent of early generative grammar and GB/P and P have led to scientific revolutions in disciplinary methods have not gone unchallenged. Engaging in a common critique of how generative grammarians have told the history of their field, Matthews (1993) suggests that Chomsky and his supporters have invoked the concept of Kuhnian revolutions in order to present an oversimplified and romanticized portrait of the ascendance of their approach; framing Chomsky’s theories as leading to revolutions has, according to Matthews and others, been a rhetorical strategy (although they have avoided using the rhetorical language180) invoked by generative grammarians in order to engage in boundary work. Specifically, Matthews claims that invoking the notion of Kuhnian revolutions has “allowed Chomsky’s supporters to make events fit Kuhn’s model” (28). In particular, critiques of the sort presented by Matthews (the most developed of which have been produced by Murray [1980] and [1994]) have worked to debunk the Hymes (1974) does, however, invoke the notions of “rhetoric and ideology” (16) when describing this issue. 180 Oenbring / 175 idea, common among generative grammarians, and promoted by Chomsky himself,181 that there was a broad effort on the behalf of the post-Bloomfieldians and other linguists to block Chomsky from publication. (One of Chomsky’s favorite [untrue] claims is that LSLT wasn’t published until the 1970s because it was against the concerns of the linguistic establishment.) Murray (1980) and (1994), however, suggests that Bloch, a leading post-Bloomfieldian and editor of the journal Language, actually did much to further Chomsky’s career. Countering Murray’s critique in 1980’s “Gatekeepers and the ‘Chomskyan Revolution,’” Newmeyer’s second edition of Linguistic Theory in America suggests, largely correctly, that “Kuhn never implies that the old guard oppresses new ideas” (38) in Structure. Indeed, while Kuhn does suggest in Structure that older generations of scholars may demonstrate “resistance” to new ideas, this “resistance,” as articulated in Structure, is more an unwillingness on the older generation’s part to convert to the new paradigm than an active attempt to prevent the ascendance of the new paradigm. Newmeyer, furthermore, in his “Has there been a Chomskyan Revolution in Linguistics?”, another attempt to counter Murray’s claims, deploys a rhetoric of revolutionary disciplinary development while recognizing that one of the central 181 In particular, Chomsky has attempted to suggest that the fact that his massive 1955 manuscript The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory wasn’t published until 1975 was because the field wasn’t receptive to his work. Chomsky suggests this clearly in The Generative Enterprise Revisited: “it is true that [my] work is quite removed from what was called ‘linguistics’ twentyfive years ago. That is why I am at MIT, not at a university that had a tradition in linguistics. And it is why my first work was not published until twenty years after it was finished, in 1975” (67). Murray (1999), however, provides clear evidence — including the entire body of a short 1957 letter from Chomsky to a Dutch publisher — that two Dutch publishers were interested in LSLT in the fifties. What’s more, Chomsky states clearly on the first page of the introduction to LSLT that “I have, for several years, refused offers to publish” (1) the book. Oenbring / 176 requirements of Kuhn’s model has not taken place following Chomsky’s ‘revolution’: namely, Kuhn’s requirement that researchers in a field quickly achieve near total consensus after a revolution. That is to say, while making claims using explicitly Kuhnian language (i.e., claiming that there had, in fact, been a Chomskyan revolution), Newmeyer, nevertheless, criticizes Kuhnian historiography. Newmeyer states, for example, that “Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions has been subject to considerable scrutiny; and it seems fair to say that only a small number of philosophers of science accept it, even in broad outline” (1986b: 7). It is interesting to note that generative grammarians have claimed revolutionary status for several of the programs that Chomsky has sponsored even though many have denigrated the specifics of Kuhnian historiography. Indeed, although Kuhn makes several general claims for how scientific revolutions are set up in Structure, Kuhn’s ideas about the setup of scientific revolutions articulated in Structure seem to have quickly merged with more popular understandings of the concept of revolution, and rhetors deploying the concept of scientific revolutions need not even suggest that the revolution that they are arguing for closely follows the outline of the plot182 of scientific revolutions that Kuhn suggests in Structure. All of this leads quickly to a hypothesis regarding a reason for the resounding success of Kuhn’s book: one might suggest that one reason why Kuhn’s text has been so successful is that scholars of many different stripes have been able to read their own agendas into Structure’s vague and alluring propositions. Indeed, the chapter titles of Structure attempt to frame a coherent plot. A few include: “The Route to Normal Science”; “Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveries”; “Crisis and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveries”; “The Response to Crisis”; and “The Resolution of Revolutions.” 182 Oenbring / 177 Terminology and Disciplinary Identity In Shaping Science with Rhetoric, rhetorician of science Ceccarelli analyzes several successful and not-so successful attempts to reorganize communities of scholars, with a focus on both successful ‘revolutionary’ scientists (Dobzhansky, Schrӧdinger) and less-than successful revolutionary scientists (Wilson). According to Ceccarelli, an important tool used by scientists able to foment intellectual revolutions and unite competing intellectual communities is what she calls conceptual chiasmus. Basically, conceptual chiasmus means this: using language and concepts that allow competing intellectual communities to see the world through one another’s eyes thereby reorganizing the discipline around new core metaphors and models. Ceccarelli defines conceptual chiasmus specifically as “a rhetorical strategy that reverses disciplinary expectations surrounding conceptual categories, often through metaphor, to promote the parallel crisscrossing of intellectual space. With a conceptual chiasmus, unusual linguistic choices force readers from one discipline to think about an issue in terms more appropriate to their counterparts in another discipline, and vice versa” (5). As Ceccarelli’s notion reminds us, specific metaphors and concepts can, in a very real sense, play an important role in constituting intellectual communities. While Ceccarelli avoids the term, it is clear that what she is describing with conceptual chiasmus is a form of what I have called in this study identity work; metaphors and concepts that are successful in building new intellectual communities are those that lay the foundations for new Oenbring / 178 disciplinary identities. Moreover, such identity work can be a much more powerful tool than boundary work. One of Chomsky’s most important rhetorical strategies for engaging in identity work — that is for constituting the community of generative grammarians and linguists as coherent wholes — has, I would like to suggest, been his work to promote of a host of bold and alluring concepts and dichotomies, a tradition he has continued throughout his career. Indeed, as I have intimated, one of Chomsky’s primary functions within generative grammar and linguistics as a whole has been as a phrase maker. As I will show, many of Chomsky’s important terms — what I shall refer to here as points of identity — have become quite widespread in use, and not just among generative grammarians, but also among linguists of many different stripes. That is to say, one of the primary reasons generative grammarians and linguists as whole appear beholden to Chomsky is that the terms he has sponsored have become rallying points and points of disciplinary coherence and identity. What’s more, Chomsky routinely introduces perfectly good terms only to abandon or rearticulate many of them after several years; he has routinely updated his guiding terminology — what we might call, following rhetorician Kenneth Burke, his god-terms183 — often in co-occurrence with his subrevolutions. It is clear that these changes of god-terms are done in order to build the appearance of revolution — and the revolutionary identity of — these subsequent shifts in methods. 183 I.e., bold, vague notions that we are expected to pay deference to (e.g., freedom and justice). Oenbring / 179 Chomsky has sponsored several dichotomies that have proven captivating to the disciplinary imagination of linguists, including: competence and performance (later rearticulated as i-language and e-language); deep structure / surface structure (later reframed as D-structure / S-structure). This introduction of terminology routinely takes place in what I have called the early world creation sections of his linguistic writing. Similarly, Chomsky has sponsored stand-alone terminology, some of it seemingly contradictory. 184 Chomsky’s most famous terms include (in roughly historical order): the creative aspect of language use (a focus on why human beings are able to produce novel well-formed sentences of their native tongues and have other people recognize those sentences as well-formed); universal grammar (the theory that there exist biologicallyinnate [and accessible] characteristics of all human languages); the initial state of the organism (basically, the state of universal grammar at birth); Cartesian linguistics (in Chomsky’s definition this covers both the innate element, and the creative nature of human languages, notions that he traces, largely erroneously, to Descartes) ; the poverty of stimulus (the notion that children do not [apparently] receive enough stimulus to learn as perfectly as they do the syntax of their language, thus being support for the biological Indeed, many of the captivating notions that Chomsky has espoused across his project — and even the concepts that he has espoused at the same time — can seem strangely contradictory or incommensurable with one another. Although much of the appeal of Chomsky’s works has stemmed from his appearance as a much more systematic (or at least system-sponsoring) scholar than the postmodern hordes, Chomsky’s success as a rhetor can, to some degree, be connected to the fact that the concepts he has promoted seem coherent and systematic in that they have been held together as a system by Chomsky’s name. That is to say, Chomsky is certainly more of a Nietzschean aphorist than he and his followers would like to admit. 184 Oenbring / 180 nature of language185); Plato’s problem (a place in Plato’s work that Chomsky suggests is analogous to the learning of syntax where Socrates claims that the principles of geometry must exist as innate ideas as boys can learn them so quickly); Orwell’s problem (how to account for the creative nature of language use [and the fundamentally creative nature of human beings] — something Chomsky claims is a serious problem for anyone focusing on the socially-constructed nature of language, as Orwell apparently does in his dystopian novel 1984); methodological naturalism (treating human languages as objects of nature); and, most recently, biolinguistics (a term reemphasizing the biological nature of human languages). Of course, Chomsky did not invent all of these terms. Chomsky’s recent (2006) manuscript “Approaching UG from Below,” for example, credits the term “biolinguistics” to Piattelli in 1974. Nevertheless, many of these concepts have become intimately tied to Chomsky’s name within the disciplinary matrix of linguistics; regardless of their origin, the terms have become famous precisely because Chomsky has promoted them, with the spread of these terms, these points of identity, serving to reinforce Chomsky’s influence. That is to say, the prominent place that Chomsky’s terminology has played in generative grammar has led to the disciplinary coherence of generative grammar — and linguistics as a whole — being tied to Chomsky’s own person. Perhaps the most interesting and (and for certain one of the most successful) of these points of identity that Chomsky has sponsored is the notion of universal grammar, See, for example, Chomsky’s famous 1959 review of behaviorist psychologist B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior in the journal Language. 185 Oenbring / 181 a notion that he introduced during the Aspects period. The idea that linguists could be uncovering biological properties merely by analyzing the setup and function of strings of syntax is, for certain, a tantalizing notion. Accordingly, many linguists — even those analyzing elements of language other than syntax — claim, both when speaking among themselves and when speaking of their project to others, that the ultimate goal of their project is to uncover the features of universal grammar.186 Indeed, it is interesting to note how other linguists, even those not directly beholden to Chomsky’s methods, have rhetorically used the Chomsky’s repertoire of 186 It is interesting to note, however, that Chomsky first rationalizes a search for universal grammar in order to account for the creative aspect of language use, something that Chomsky claims was a major concern of traditional linguistic theory (Humboldt and the Port Royal Grammarians); Chomsky authorizes a new distinctly Chomskyan notion through another distinctly Chomskyan notion (Aspects 6). While defining discipline-specific terms in relation to one another may seem like tautology, this is a technique that Chomsky has used throughout his career. (Indeed, Chomsky has himself recently admitted that the divide between two of his most alluring and most frequently invoked terms [specifically language acquisition device and universal grammar] is not clear: Chomsky has openly admitted that these terms that he frequently invokes mean “the same thing” [2000: 54]). Such swarming of terminology (i.e., redefining concepts in terms of one another) is one of Chomsky’s common rhetorical techniques. The rhetorical effect of such swarming of terminology is, in effect, to create a hermetically-sealed world of terminology where terms are defined in regard to one another, thus serving the projects of world creation and identity work. The following passage from Chomsky’s Essays on Form and Interpretation is as a nice example of Chomsky using specific terms to undergird and legitimate other terms, all serving the project of world creation: The class of possible human languages is, I assume, specified by a genetically determined property, apparently species-specific in important respects. Any proposed linguistic theory — in particular EST — may be regarded as attempt to capture this property, at least in part. Thus a linguistic theory may be understood as a theory of the biological endowment that underlies the acquisition and use of language: in other terms, as a theory of universal grammar (UG), where we take the goal of UG to be the expression of those properties of human language that are biologically necessary. So understood, UG is the theory of the human faculty of language. Any particular grammar conforms to the principles of UG. (2, emphasis added) Note the density of the distinctly Chomskyan terms in this paragraph. Chomsky is, in a very real sense, building and solidifying a distinct intellectual space with such terminology. Oenbring / 182 points of identity to undergird the claims of their own works.187 Just as both the liberal and the conservative can look throughout the entire Bible and easily find evidence in support of their value systems, and thereby reconcile their value system with Christianity188 (and claim that their value system is supported by the authority of Christianity), so can the linguist choose and latch onto whichever points of identity in Chomsky’s work that they prefer and thereby reconcile their work with the project of generative grammar — and by extension ‘scientific’ linguistics. That is to say, others can read what they want into the master text, and use individual points of identity in the master text to claim the authority of the master text’s traditions in order to support their own work. Much like a liberal need only invoke the parts of the Beatitudes to make their project Christian, so can the linguist invoke a point of identity from Chomsky’s work to make their project ‘science’. That is to say, by reconciling their work with the project of generative grammar, linguists can frame their work as part of the broader project of scientific (i.e., biologically-focused) linguistics. De Swart’s 1998 semantics textbook Introduction to Natural Language Semantics is a good example of this. While the book 187 As literary theorists have argued (most notably Fish [1980]), a text is to a large degree created by its readers. Similarly, rhetors can, based on their ruling beliefs and predispositions, read seemingly contradictory notions into the same text, claiming the same text as support for vastly different programs. The more captivating and vague are the text’s claims and its prose, the more likely this is the case. 188 Just to list a few possible points of identity from the Gospel of Matthew, on the liberal side: 1) Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth; 2) Blessed are the peacemakers; 3) Love your enemies; 4) Judge not, that ye be not judged; 5) all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them; and on the conservative side: 1) Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets; 2) But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart; 3) Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. Oenbring / 183 as a whole seems based on a platonistic, non-embodied theory of knowledge, the book still demonstrates deference to Chomsky’s competence / performance dichotomy. De Swart suggests, for example, in the introduction to the book that “knowledge of the language system which is stored in the brain is what Chomsky (1965) refers to as the speaker’s competence. Competence is contrasted with performance, which applies to the use of the language system” (2). Indeed, De Swart’s invocation of the competence / performance dichotomy seems to exist merely to frame the piece as part of a broader project of uncovering the biological nature of language; the competence / performance dichotomy has no bearing on the actual models of language presented in the book other than to undergird the text’s place within the broader project of biologically-focused ‘scientific’ linguistics. Indeed, one might say that the only reason De Swart invokes Chomsky’s famous dichotomy is to present a coherent public face of the discipline to initiates. Political Work and Revolutionary Ethos A final element of Chomsky’s work that must be discussed in order to give a thorough account of the place that the notion of revolution has played in the history of generative grammar is Chomsky’s political work — the body of writing that he is, arguably, most famous for throughout the academy and that he is, for certain, most known for outside academia.189 While Chomsky and his followers dismiss the idea that his political work has played a role in how his theories have been adjudicated by the Nevertheless, Chomsky’s political work has received remarkably little attention from scholars commenting on the Chomskyan revolution. 189 Oenbring / 184 linguistic establishment,190 Chomsky’s moral/political stature as perhaps the most important radical public intellectual in America and his status as a ‘revolutionary’ linguist have served to reinforce one another; just Chomsky’s fame as a ‘revolutionary’ linguist has, without a doubt, served to build his credibility as an intellectual prophet among popular audiences interested in his political work, his authority as a moral/political leader has supported his cult of personality in the area of linguistics. Of course, undertaking an analysis of Chomsky’s political work, due to the sheer volume of publications that Chomsky has produced over the decades, is, in many ways, a more intimidating task than analyzing Chomsky’s linguistic scholarship, and this study makes no pretension of offering an authoritative word on Chomsky’s political writings. Nevertheless, this chapter, an analysis of the role that the notion of revolution has played in the history of generative grammar, would not be complete without at least a cursory consideration of Chomsky’s political work — a body of writing that has worked to solidify what I shall call Chomsky’s revolutionary ethos.191 Chomsky is, according to one of his hagiographers, “a beacon, an inspiration, a catalyst for action” (Barsky 2007: 12) to many that follow his political writings, and I, like many, am sympathetic with his overarching project in the area of politics and ideology. Indeed, I am willing to state that I believe that, in the political arena, Indeed, Newmeyer pays almost no attention to Chomsky’s political work in Linguistic Theory in America, but follows Chomsky’s lead regarding the place of politics in the study of language in The Politics of Linguistics. 191 As Kennedy notes in his commentary on his edition of Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, the concept of ethos that dominates the piece is not language practices that a rhetor uses in order to project themselves as an ethical subject, but is rather the worldview of a group of people. Nevertheless, both are found in On Rhetoric, and the latter, although seemingly arhetorical, is the concept that dominates the piece. When rhetorical critics use the concept of ethos, however, they largely understand ethos with the former definition, often positing a host of different types of ethoi. 190 Oenbring / 185 Chomsky’s critiques have been of great value, especially at spreading system-based critiques of the operations of power to popular audiences — even if I am suspicious of the cult of personality that his writings on politics have engendered.192 Sympathy with Chomsky’s political work, should not, however, as it has for many linguists, lead to wholehearted deference to Chomsky’s claims in the area of linguistic theory. (Indeed, linguist Carlos P. Otero, one of Chomsky’s most obsequious supporters of the master’s cult of personality in both the realms of linguistics and politics, isn’t afraid — while clearly commenting to some degree on the stances that Chomsky has taken — to label Chomsky a “member of the prophetic tradition” [Language and Politics 34].) While Chomsky had already secured his place as one of the most influential living linguists in the world by the mid-sixties, he did not rest on his academic achievements. Indeed, through his political activism during the Vietnam War era, Chomsky quickly became one of the most famous radical public intellectuals in North America, a status that he maintains to this day. (If anything, Chomsky’s political work has increased in the past ten years as the frequency of his publications in linguistics has waned.) While many contemporary academics spend much of their time bemoaning the fact that their trenchant analyses of current events and contemporary culture are not paid attention to by the populace and the popular media, finding an audience for his political theories has never been a problem for Chomsky. Indeed, Chomsky’s first published volume of political writings American Power and the New Mandarins (1969) and its translations led to reviews documented in at least twenty publications, including major forums like The New 192 See Barsky (2007) for a largely hagiographic, but still interesting and valuable review of Chomsky’s place in popular culture. Oenbring / 186 York Times, Newsweek, The Economist, and The Christian Science Monitor (Koerner and Tajima 96). While his first major political writings were critiques of American involvement in South East Asia,193 Chomsky quickly expanded the scope of his analyses to include all of the following: American foreign policy in the Middle East, often in critique of Israel194; American foreign policy in Latin America195; corporate control of media196; and, most recently, American interventionism in the post-9/11 world.197 In his attacks on oppressive systems of power in his political writings, Chomsky has routinely suggested that academics themselves have been co-opted by the systems of power that it is their duty to critique.198 Indeed, Chomsky has routinely positioned himself as an outsider to a thoughtless academic establishment, a position that has worked to build his ‘revolutionary ethos’. Broadly stated, the goal of Chomsky’s political writings is rather simple: to uncover the operations of systems of power and catalogue their lies. As a whole, Chomsky’s methods in his political work have remained largely unchanged since his earliest publications. Using major newspapers, historical documents, government 193 See, for example, At War with Asia (1970), For Reasons of State (1973), and After the Cataclysm (1979) with Herman, one of Chomsky’s most prolific co-authors on issues of politics. 194 See, for example, The Fateful Triangle (1983), and Pirates and Emperors (1986). 195 See, for example, On Power and Ideology: the Managua Lectures (1987), and Latin America: from Colonization to Globalization [1999], a book of interviews by Dieterich. 196 See, for example, Manufacturing Consent (1988) (with Herman) Necessary Illusions (1989), and Media Control (1997). 197 See, for example, 9-11 (2002), Hegemony or Survival (2003), Imperial Ambitions (2005) (a book of interviews by Barsamian), and Failed States (2006), and Interventions (2007), a book of reprinted post-9-11 op-eds. 198 See, for example, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” an essay first presented as a talk, then in The New York Review of Books, and later in American Power and the New Mandarins (328) and “The Secular Priesthood and the Perils of Democracy” in On Nature and Language. Oenbring / 187 reports, academic studies,199 and plenty of specious and non-sources, Chomsky attempts to catalogue the systematic distortion of the truth by the powerful. While Chomsky often trenchantly scrutinizes specific language choices and misrepresentations by the powerful,200 he does not offer general principles for analyzing the language practices of those in power. The task of ideological critique, Chomsky believes, is rather simple; all that is necessary is a little help taking off the veils.201 Moreover, Chomsky rarely attempts to promote a specific argument about why the actions he analyzes should be seen as immoral; he assumes his audience will clearly see the moral reprehensibility of the actions that he analyzes. That is to say, he believes that there exist unshakable bedrock states of justice and truth, and he assumes that his audiences could and will make the same connections he does in his analyses. In fact, Chomsky has stated more than one that anyone of “normal intelligence” with “healthy skepticism” (Language and Responsibility 3) can do the sorts of ideological critiques he does in his political work. Despite the fact that he has never lacked an audience willing to hear his ideas on politics, Chomsky’s political writings rarely do more than catalogue and uncover what he sees as the lies of institutions and systems of power; Chomsky rarely offers a concrete action plan for building the sort of society that he (and many others) would like to see engendered. While in his political writing Chomsky rarely does more than critique, the For example, Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. See, for example, “Vietnam and the United States Global Strategy” in The Chomsky Reader. 201 Indeed, Chomsky states very directly on the first page of Language and Responsibility that “critical analysis in the ideological area seems to me to be a fairly straightforward conceptual abstraction. For the analysis of ideology, which occupies me very much, a bit of openmindedness, normal intelligence, and healthy skepticism will generally suffice” (3). 199 200 Oenbring / 188 political system that he promotes is basically anarcho-syndicalism. In a rare moment of espousing rather than critiquing, Chomsky gives in his famous debate with Foucault an extremely vague outline to the setup of the sort of society he would like engendered: Now a federated, decentralized system of free associations, incorporating economic as well as other social institutions, would be what I refer to as anarchosyndicalism; and it seems to me that this is the appropriate form of social organization for an advanced technological society, in which human beings do not have to be forced into the position of tools, of cogs in the machine. There is no longer any social necessity for human beings to be treated as mechanical elements in the productive process; that can be overcome and we must overcome it by a society of freedom and free association, in which the creative urge that I consider intrinsic to human nature, will in fact be able to realise itself in whatever way it will. (Chomsky-Foucault Debate 38-39) Of course, a “decentralized system of free associations” is a laudable ideal, but proposing it as an ideal is very far from a specific action plan for implementing such a system.202 While Chomsky’s political work clearly demonstrates a thorough understanding of the arbitrary and limiting effects of systems of power — a major concern of many contemporary humanities academics, Chomsky’s political scholarship is, in many ways, incommensurable with much politically-informed scholarship in the contemporary humanities and social sciences. For one, Chomsky’s political writings are in many ways For a slightly more developed — but still very abstract — discussion see the very slim (2005) volume Government in the Future based on a single speech by Chomsky in 1970. (As if anything important has occurred in international politics since then!) 202 Oenbring / 189 atheoretical; Chomsky is resistant to using the Marxist and postmodern-theoretical terminology of contemporary humanists when they describe the operations of power (e.g., discursive formations203 and subaltern consciousness). (Two notable exceptions are the terms ideology and hegemony — both of which can be found in the titles of books that Chomsky has written: On Ideology and Power [1987] and, more recently, Hegemony or Survival [2003]. However, the terms ideology and hegemony are never theorized in these books.) Chomsky’s unwillingness to use Marxist and postmodernist jargon may explain, in part, why his political writings have been so successful. Chomsky’s political writings are, to a large extent, written for a popular audience. That is to say, they aren’t academic pieces. Indeed, it is even arguable that Chomsky’s writings on politics have, due to their greater accessibility to general academic and non-academic audiences, been more successful at spreading the message of the arbitrary limiting effects of systems of power than entire academic fields focused on exposing these same issues (e.g., critical discourse analysis). Another difference that makes Chomsky’s political work seemingly incommensurable with much contemporary politically-informed scholarship in the humanities and social science is that Chomsky, unlike many contemporary humanists and social scientists, is invested in a robust theory of human nature, a theory that is grounded in notions of human biology. Indeed, despite the fact that in his political work Chomsky clearly demonstrates an understanding of the constraining effects of systems of power, he 203 See Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge. Oenbring / 190 is unwilling to make the leap that many postmodernists do that suggests that human beliefs are necessarily the byproducts of the locally- legitimated language games of their surrounding culture and that there exist no bedrock foundations of justice or truth.204 Rather, when confronted with such postmodernist critiques Chomsky instead reiterates his belief that human syntax, and by extension, human language practices as a whole, can and should be described by appeals to a robust notion of human nature. For example, when asked in an interview to reflect on Derrida’s critique of Western metaphysics, a critique that foregrounds the indeterminacy of language, Chomsky claims first that he doesn’t find such critiques interesting and later moves on to suggest that “what we find is that there is a highly determinate, very definite structure of concepts and of meaning that is intrinsic to our nature, and that as we acquire language or other cognitive systems these things just kind of grow in our minds, like the same way we grow arms and legs” (“Language, Politics and Composition,” Chomsky on Democracy and Education 377). Following the stance he took earlier in his career as an outsider promoting the idea of an innate, creative human nature in the face of an inhumane behaviorist and social science establishment (I shall explain this more later), Chomsky has in recent years positioned himself as a defiant defender of the enlightenment in the face of the hordes of charlatan postmodernists. Chomsky, for example, claims in a 1992 essay in Z papers “Rationality/science and post-this-or-that,” later reprinted in Chomsky on Democracy and Education, that: 204 See, for example, Lyotard (1979 [1984]), and Rorty (1979). Oenbring / 191 Keeping to the personal level, I have spent a lot of my life working on questions such as these, using the only methods I know of — those condemned here as “science,” “rationality,” “logic,” and so on. I therefore read the papers [of postmodernists] with some hope that they would help me “transcend” these limitations, or perhaps suggest an entirely different course. I’m afraid I was disappointed. Admittedly, that may be my own limitation. Quite regularly, “my eyes glaze over” when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count … no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish (93) In “Rationality/science,” Chomsk’s most important rejoinder to the so-called ‘science wars’ of the 1990s, Chomsky makes his feelings about postmodern philosophy clear; it is “polysyllabic discourse,” consisting largely of “truism, error, or gibberish.” In the above passage, Chomsky invokes a position of modesty, claiming that his inability to understand postmodern analyses may result from his “own limitation.” Indeed, as many commentators have noted, Chomsky is in his lectures and in personal interviews oftentimes “disarmingly modest” (Mehta 187). This modesty is not merely, as some might suggest, the sign of a self-deprecating personality — a self-deprecating personality that one might attempt to connect to Chomsky’s upbringing in Philadelphia Jewish culture. Rather, Chomsky has strategically and rhetorically invoked modesty throughout his career, a modesty that has allowed him to frame his claims not as his own Oenbring / 192 individual pronouncements, but rather as the scrupulous findings of a group of researchers. That is to say, invoking modesty has allowed Chomsky to occlude his own agency in the development of his theories. For example, when directly asked about his influence in the field of linguistics and to reflect on the advent of his theories, Chomsky is oftentimes quick to defuse the idea that (certain) of his ideas are entirely new or that he developed his ideas largely by himself, suggesting instead that the theories that he has sponsored (and have become intimately tied to his own name) are theories developed that developed in dialogue with his graduate students (Chomsky on Democracy and Education 379) and other scholars (see, for example, Haley and Lunsford 137). Indeed, one might even go so far as to say that Chomsky attempts to enact the ideal in science of what philosophers and historians of science Shapin and Shaffer (1985) and Haraway (1997) have called a “modest witness” — an effaced observer faithfully reporting findings as “the objects of nature … speak through them” (Schneider 94). Boundary Work and the ‘Two Chomskys’ Because Chomsky’s political theories are decidedly system-focused and his theories of language are decidedly nature-focused, Chomsky and his followers (see, for example, Newmeyer’s The Politics of Linguistics) have routinely attempted to draw firm boundaries between political work and scientific scholarship on the study of language. For example, Chomsky has, on many occasions, stated that are no compelling connections between his theories regarding language and his theories about politics. Chomsky states quite clearly in Language and Responsibility that “there is no very direct Oenbring / 193 connection between my political activities, writing and other, and the work bearing on language structures” (3). Chomsky’s claims for the incommensurability of his two worlds, although raising the ire of many of his critics, has, however, been a point championed by many of his followers. Despite the fact that Chomsky’s political work and his work on language seem totally at odds with one another, many commentators have attempted to suggest the existence of features that unify the two Chomskys. Several commentators suggest, for example, that a feature unifying his work in both areas is his idealism (see, for example, Smith’s Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals and Haley and Lunsford [4]). A possible connection between Chomsky’s anarchist politics and his linguistic theories that scholars have noted — and a connection that I find more compelling than others — is his respect in both bodies of work for the autonomous, creative, unconstructed subject. That is to say, humans have, according to Chomsky, a biological, not cultural, need to express themselves creatively — both in their use of language and in their everyday interactions (see, for example, Chilton 24). While attempting to reconcile the differences between the two Chomskys is, indeed, interesting, what is more relevant to this study is to account for what Chomsky’s suggestion that there are no similarities between his linguistics and his politics offers rhetorically. For one, Chomsky can advance system-focused political critiques all while defending his claims regarding the innateness of language. Similarly, by suggesting that ideological critique is easy, he can denigrate the importance of approaches to the study of language that foreground the social nature of language (e.g., poststructuralism and Oenbring / 194 sociolinguistics); whereas analyzing language as biology is real scholarship and a proper scientific pursuit, analyzing the social nature of language (i.e., language as culture) is a hobby.205 Conclusion To end merely by stating that Chomsky’s moral/political stature as one of the most vocal and prominent critics of American foreign policy and his stance against the behaviorist-social science and later postmodernist establishment has helped him embody an outsider, revolutionary ethos is not, however, to go far enough, as it does not impart enough rhetorical agency upon Chomsky. Indeed, Chomsky has done much himself to embody the trope of prophet in the wilderness. That is to say, Chomsky has attempted to frame himself in both his scholarship on language and in his political work as a marginalized figure presenting a liberating truth while exposing the lies of powerful 205 While Chomsky routinely suggests that almost anyone can do the sort ideological critique he does in his political work, Chomsky’s writings on issues of politics have, unquestionably, supported his cult of personality in the area of linguistics. Following the master’s claims, Otero, although a expressing support for Chomsky’s notion that ‘anyone can do this’, nevertheless, wholeheartedly supports the notion that Chomsky is a thoroughly exceptional human being, suggesting in the introduction to a volume of Chomsky’s political writings that “some might be inclined to argue that by taking upon himself responsibilities that most people would be able to carry out if they put their mind to it, he has ignored a heavier responsibility of not unnecessarily risking his life, and with it many fruitful years of labor” (Language and Politics 37). (C.f., John 3:16 : “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son.”) Not one for understatement, Otero claims elsewhere in the introduction, apparently without blushing, that “if the usual standards had been applied to [Chomsky] (and presumably they would have been, had he not challenged official doctrines), he would have been seen for many years now as a towering figure in the history of civilization” (17). This quote is particularly interesting in that it suggests that Chomsky’s radical politics have prevented his ideas about language and human nature from getting a proper hearing in the forum of ideas; Otero suggests that Chomsky would have and could have been more successful at spreading his ideas about language if he had not engaged in political work. Oenbring / 195 institutional establishments. He has, in his work, consciously or unconsciously embodied what rhetorician of science Alan Gross calls “the Galilean myth canonizing deviance” (13).206 Playing into this Galliean myth, Chomsky and his supporters have routinely attempted to frame Chomsky as a marginal figure in the field of linguistics and the academic world as a whole. Chomsky, indeed, regularly understates his own importance in the field of linguistics. Chomsky, for example, suggests, rather hyperbolically, in the 1979/80 interviews of The Generative Enterprise Revisited that “it also has to be emphasized …that this framework is only taken seriously by a tiny minority in the field, certainly in the United States. For example I rarely give a talk in a linguistics department on any work of the past ten or fifteen years” (67). While we should recognize that Chomsky did suggest this during EST, a low point in his prestige, the statement is, however, clearly hyperbolic. In the same interview, Chomsky continues his position of faux modesty. Specifically, Chomsky claims that “at least as I look back over my own relation to the field, in every point it has been completely isolated, or almost completely isolated. I do not see that the situation is very different now. In fact, I think it is hardly less true now than before” (68). Needless to say, this is quite a surprising comment coming from (both then and now) the world’s most famous living linguist. The rhetorical purpose of this statement is, however, clear: Chomsky is attempting to emphasize his status as a marginalized figure (thereby building his outsider ethos). 206 Interestingly, as I suggest later, Chomsky even connects the foundations of generative grammar with the observations of Galileo in some of his most recent publications on language (see, for example, 2002’s On Nature and Language). Oenbring / 196 Similarly, despite the fact that Chomsky is one of the most famous radical public intellectuals of the past half-century, his supporters have attempted to suggest that there has been a concerted effort on the behalf of the powerful to silence Chomsky’s political work. Barsky, for example, quotes Herman, one of Chomsky’s frequent co-authors for political books, in Noam Chomsky: a Life of Dissent, as stating that: During the Vietnam war era, a period of sizable and active anti-war movement, roughly from 1965 to 1972, Chomsky wrote and spoke extensively, but even then his access was confined to radical publications like Ramparts and Liberation, plus the New York Review of books, the mainstream exception through 1972. Chomsky has never had an Op Ed column in the Washington Post, and his lone opinion piece in the New York Times was not an original contribution but rather excerpts from testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. (qtd. in Barsky : 162) Of course, at other times, Chomsky’s followers brag openly about the master’s influence (e.g., Otero happily reports that Chomsky has been “only activist and critic of United States domestic and foreign policy to make Nixon’s ‘enemy list’” [18]). Similarly, a major theme of at least two of the most important films promoting Chomsky’s political work Manufacturing Consent and Noam Chomsky: Rebel without a Pause — both seemingly more interested in fanning the flames of the master’s cult of personality than actually presenting his political ideas — is that Chomsky has been inappropriately barred from participation in major media forums. Oenbring / 197 More broadly, we can say that a rhetorical technique that Chomsky has used — and his followers have picked up on, both in how he has told the history of linguistics and in his political work — is enacting a perpetual posture of dissidence, a posture that has continued well past the time of his actual marginalization. Indeed, the revolutionary identity of the field of generative grammar in conjunction with Chomsky’s own radical political credentials have worked in conjunction to solidify the master’s revolutionary ethos, an ethos that has given Chomsky the prerogative to move the field according to his intuitions. That is say, although Chomsky has occupied halls of power for quite some time, he still wears for his followers the same fatigues he wore in the jungle of the Sierra Maestra decades ago. Oenbring / 198 Chapter 5: The Textual Dynamics of Generative Grammar, Part I: The Research Article and Linguistics Textbook Introduction I have, up to now, provided a rhetorical reading of the history of generative grammar that, due to the expansive nature of the events and texts brought together, has had to paint in rather broad strokes. Moreover, despite this study’s frequent use of close reading and its close attention to the environment in which the texts being analyzed were articulated, the analysis that I have provided up to now may seem more the proper object for a historian of linguistics, rather than a rhetorician. In the next two chapters, I make a turn toward a closer analysis of the texturation of generative grammar; in the coming two chapters I offer an analysis of the specific textual and rhetorical features of several different types of texts (what I shall call, following current practice in rhetoric and composition, different genres) in which the scholarship of generative grammar is manifested. Specifically, I tie the specific textual features of prominent textual forms to the communities that use the texts. That is to say, what I offer here is a basic analysis of the textual dynamics of generative grammar. Tracing the history and methods of post-Bloomfieldian linguists, Hymes and Fought label three distinct genres as constituting the core of post-Bloomfieldian methods. These are the “wholely theoretical article,” the “presentation of theoretical points in connection of an analysis of data from a specific language” and, beginning with Zellig Harris, the “structural restatement.” Hymes and Fought suggest that “the underlying Oenbring / 199 continuity from the Bloomfieldian generation onward can be seen in terms of these genres” (123). As Hymes and Fought recognize, the shape and function of the available genres at work within a given academic discipline can provide insight into the prevailing values and habits of that intellectual community. What’s more, genres may seem to have lives of their own; genres can be treated as autonomous structures that constrain the functions of the intellectual communities that use them. Accordingly, Hymes and Fought attribute Chomsky’s success as a rhetor in part to his ability to hijack the postBloomfieldians’ repertoire of genres of technical scholarship; they suggest that Chomsky succeeded in part because he was able to appropriate and refocus the goals of the “three genres which had been established as central to linguistics by the Bloomfieldians” (123). However, as several scholars have noted, very few people outside of committed generative grammarians actually take the time to read Chomsky’s or other generative grammarians’ technical scholarship. Indeed, as Sampson observes, “only a fraction of … people … are likely to have read more than a token few paragraphs of [Chomsky’s] writing. They read secondary paperbacks and journalism by other writers, who simplified the master’s message while sometimes glossing over the problems within it” (The ‘Language Instinct’ Debate 13). While popularizers of Chomsky’s work,207 including, quite prominently, Chomsky himself, 208 have brought the master’s work to a broader academic audience, they have, however, along the way had to strategically reframe and simplify its propositions in order to meet with the needs of broader audiences. (Indeed, See, for example, Pinker’s The Language Instinct. Indeed, as early as his 1966 and 1968 books Cartesian Linguistics and Language and Mind, we see Chomsky producing texts arguably designed more to secure the place of his linguistic theories among a broader academic audience than to influence syntactic theory. 207 208 Oenbring / 200 the widespread scientific prestige of generative grammar can, at least in part, be tied to the success of these popularizations.) As Seuren (2004: 14) argues, textbooks by generative grammarians sympathetic to Chomsky are often no better, deferring to Chomsky and/or providing oversimplified examples.209 As all of this suggests, there is a clear buffer layer between the habitual forms of practice in articles aimed at technical audiences and what non-specialists actually get the opportunity to read (and understand). Conversely, within the specific technical discourse of generative grammarians, there exist, as in any academic discipline, certain conventions guiding what constitutes acceptable writing (and knowledge). These conventions include: what counts as proper evidence, what counts as a proper raison d’etre for an article, the forms of exposition that are used, what sources are used, etc. Over the history of generative grammar, the technical scholarship of generative grammar has continued through the work of motivated specialists working with a highly specific set of problems and methods, with the set of problems and methods guided by and inspired by Chomsky’s technical works. In the coming two chapters, I intend put the important features of the various genres in which generative scholarship is manifested in relief by juxtaposing several of these different forms of writing, thereby providing evidence for the prevailing ideologies and beliefs of the communities that use those texts. As such, this chapter is, in part, an intervention into the area of rhetorical scholarship known as popularization studies: the What’s more, Chomsky’s followers are, as a whole, quite rhetorically well-behaved; they follow the master’s cues and rehash his talking points when presenting their ideas to nonbelievers. 209 Oenbring / 201 study of how scholarly findings and knowledge claims are reformulated and rereported in order to meet with the needs of non-specialist audiences. The genres that I analyze in the next two chapters include both Chomsky’s own repertoire of styles and several of the most important genres produced by the broader community of generative grammarians and linguists. With the former texts, I am interested in how Chomsky has reframed his ideas in order to meet with the needs of different audiences. With the later, what I am interested in is the dominant modes of exposition in these important genres, as well as how these other linguists have represented and confronted Chomsky’s works and person — and what ideological function their representations of Chomsky serve. The specific genres that I analyze are: the mature generative grammar research article (something Chomsky himself has produced few, if any, of); the linguistics textbook, with specific attention to how generative grammar and Chomsky himself have been represented; Chomsky’s technical texts aimed at the community of generative grammarians; and, lastly, his texts aimed at a more general academic audience. (I also touch twice upon the features of Chomsky’s political texts in order to further my analyses of Chomsky’s repertoire of genres, and his strategic use of that repertoire.) Finally, in these chapters I offer for the first time a handful of empirical measures in support of my analyses — something I do in the interest of offering more empirically scrupulous support for claims than is present in the other chapters, where, due to the broad nature of the themes being brought together, intuitionist hermeneutics runs the show. The empirical measures that I offer include a brief study of citation counts of Oenbring / 202 Chomsky’s particular publications in the technically-focused and firmly Chomskyan journal Linguistic Inquiry, as well as a short corpus linguistic study of the unique features of Chomsky’s different genres. The corpus study includes quantitative measures of language patterns in different groups of text, divided according to the genre distinctions that I posit in the coming two chapters (i.e., I have developed a corpus of texts for each of Chomsky’s technical, general academic, and political genres). While corpus studies do have their own limitations, including being limited by the practitioners of the studies’ choices for what to include in the corpora, oftentimes producing more banal than interesting findings, I have included the corpus study in the interest of including more empirically scrupulous methods in these chapters than I do other places in this study. The textual features that I search the corpora for include statistics such as average sentence length, keywords (common words in one corpus in comparison to another), and 3-grams (reoccurring strings of three words). Genre Theory and Rhetorical Criticism In order to theorize the salient features of the different texts I analyze, I have, for the purposes of these chapters, introduced the notion of genre, a term that has seen an explosion of interest among literary and rhetorical theorists in recent decades (see, for example, Bakhtin [1986], Swales [1990], Berkenkotter and Huckin [1995], and Bawarshi [2003], among others). The term genre as it is used in contemporary rhetorical theory is, of course, somewhat different from the popular understanding of the term, the latter being generally reserved for literary or artistic genres. As Swales (1990) suggests, the notion of Oenbring / 203 genre is today “used to refer to a distinctive category of discourse of any type, spoken or written, with or without literary aspirations” (Swales 33). Genres, as contemporary rhetoricians speak of them are re-occurring, habitual modes of representation that reflect, through their patterns of language and their governing rhetorical appeals, the goals and values of the people that use them. However, as Swales notes, genre remains a “fuzzy concept,” one that one approaches only with “some trepidation” (33). What Swales and others are concerned about is how the notion of genre can be used as a facile, convenient label for a group of texts, groups of texts whose boundaries are necessarily much less clear than is supposed by the label. As a whole, increased interest in the concept of genre can be seen as part of a broader phenomenon of postmodern idealism.210 That is to say, postmodern analyses of culture often rely heavily on dubious reified, autonomous cultural systems. Indeed, our motivation to speak of autonomous and unique genres stems from the same source as our desire to posit the existence of autonomous and unique discursive formations (Foucault [1969 (1972)]), paradigms (Kuhn [1962]), and language-games (Wittgenstein [1953]). However, I argue that there exist substantive, convincing reasons for positing the existence of several distinct genres at work among the community of generative grammarians, as well as within Chomsky’s own scholarship. Indeed, to suggest that Chomsky has several genres available in his repertoire is not merely to suggest that he has had several unique topics of which he has been concerned about across his career (i.e., language and politics) nor is it merely to smack a label on his bodies of text. As Indeed, as Rorty (1982) notes, postmodern textualists are “spiritual descendents of the idealists” (140). 210 Oenbring / 204 Swales suggests, genre analysis is valuable “because it is clarificatory, not because it is classificatory” (37). As a whole, Chomsky’s technical works (e.g., Aspects, Lectures on Government and Binding, and The Minimalist Program) demonstrate remarkable consistency across his career in terms of a number of variables: what voices are included, how evidence is presented, what methods are used, and how findings are reported. These similarities also exist in Chomksy’s non-technical texts, as well as his political texts, the body of scholarship for which he is most famous across and outside the academy.211 Genre and Popularization Studies in the Rhetoric of Science In recent decades, rhetoricians of science have taken an interest in popularization studies: the study of how the findings of science are translated and rereported in order to meet with the needs of non-specialists. In their analyses, rhetoricians of science have traditionally taken popularization as a one-way process of simplification. As Myers summarizes, traditionally popularization has been understood in the following manner: “in the course of translation from one discourse to the other, this information not only changes textual form, but is simplified, distorted, hyped up, and dumbed down” (266). What’s more, as Shinn and Whitley suggest, usually “popularization is not viewed as part of the knowledge production and validation process but as something external to research which can be left to non-scientists, failed scientists or ex-scientists as part of the general 211 Of course, genres are, to a large extent, artificial categories made up by the analyst, and certain texts that are placed under are the same genre may vary in their prototypicality. Moreover, the analyst can also posit the existence of subgenres ad infinitum. Nevertheless, I use the categories that I do in this piece because I believe that there are convincing reasons for positing the genres that I do. Oenbring / 205 public relations effort of the research enterprise” (3). For example, rhetorician of science Fahnestock’s famous 1986 article “Accommodating Science” traces how the findings of specific scientific articles are rereported and reframed for popular media. Comparing specific passages, Fahnestock’s article finds that the when the finding of scientific articles are rereported in popular media hedging is removed and claims are made stronger, with appeals to the authority of the researchers taking the place of the researchers’ careful explanations. More recently, however, rhetoricians of science have argued that understanding popularization as simply a one-way process of simplification, a one-way information transfer from specialists to non-specialists, neglects the real complex rhetorical dynamics at play in the transfer of information from specialists to non-specialists. What’s more, rhetoricians of science have found that non-technical scholarship can support technical scholarship. Arguing that discourse analysts and rhetorical critics should see the boundary between expert and lay discourses as more messy than neat, Myers emphasizes in a 2003 article “Discourse Studies of Scientific Popularization” that technical and popular discourses each take place in many genres, with popularization beginning early in the process of knowledge-building. Specifically, Myers suggests that: Developing a scientific claim and being a successful scientist require involvement in a range of genres: talking informally with colleagues, writing proposals that must be readable and persuasive outside the specialist field, delivering papers and responding to questions, all of what Hilgartner calls the ‘upstream’ side of a journal publication (1990: 528). More controversially, the success of a claim Oenbring / 206 involves its being cited, featured in review articles (Bazerman and Paradis, 1991), included in textbooks, and in some cases, reported in the media and in government policy documents – what Hilgartner calls the ‘downstream’ side of a journal publication. Just where does popularization start in this stream? In controversial cases, scientists can dismiss pre-prints, conference talks, review articles and government reports as simplifications, or they may claim these parallel forms of publication as embodiments of scientific authority. Ultimately what Myers is challenging here is the neat boundary between technical and non-technical discourses and genres. Moreover, he is suggesting that popularization serves a purpose in undergirding the claims of technical scholarship. As an addition to discussions surrounding popularization in rhetoric of science, these chapters hope to support claims that non-technical scholarship can and does play a role in supporting technical inquiry — something that is especially the case with highly theoretical strands of scholarship. Moreover, with the coming two chapters, I hope to develop interest in cases of quasi-popularization: the study of how the findings of technical scholarship are reported for general academic audiences and/or for students. The Research Article in Generative Grammar It is an interesting fact that Chomsky, despite being the most influential scholar in the field of generative grammar, has produced few, if any, straightforward generative Oenbring / 207 research articles.212 His job is to present grand theoretical frameworks; it is the job of others to engage in scrupulous empirical studies. Nevertheless, there have developed forums with conventions for writing within the technical discourse of generative grammarians, and budding scholars must enact these conventions in order to be granted access to the community. That is to say, although Chomsky may not have to enact these conventions, these conventions still have power. Of linguistics journals with a Chomskyan bent, the most Chomskyan journal is Linguistic Inquiry — a journal put out, not surprisingly, by MIT press. As Linguistic Inquiry is the most prototypical of Chomskyan journals, I take all of my examples of the generative grammar research article from its pages, focusing on one particular issue for the purposes of my analysis. For my analysis, I close read all of the research articles of a particular issue of Linguistic Inquiry, specifically the Spring, 1986 issue (at or near the apogee of GB / P and P). My focus on this particular issue is to give a representative, yet manageable, sample of generative research articles (but also is designed in order to give a sense of the mature generative research article).213 Released quarterly since 1970, Linguistic Inquiry has, since the beginning, demonstrated deference to Chomsky, as my coming citation study demonstrates. Indeed, the place that Chomsky and his revolution play in the identity of the journal is enshrined 1977’s “Filters and Control” (with Lasnik) and 1980’s “On Binding,” both, not surprisingly, published in Linguistic Inquiry, are as close as Chomsky has gotten to straightforward research articles. 213 The complete Linguistic Inquiry style sheet (the current one being used without modification since 1996) can be accessed here: http://mitpress.mit.edu/journals/LING/li-style.pdf. 212 Oenbring / 208 in the very first issue. The “Statement of Purpose” of the first issue of Linguistic Inquiry begins: with the publication of Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures in 1957, the field of Linguistics began to undergo certain radical changes. Most notable has been the appearance of transformational generative grammar as a serious candidate for an adequate theory of human language. Since that time, our knowledge has grown tremendously within the field of Linguistics and this knowledge has already begun to have an impact on a number of other fields, among them Anthropology, Acoustics, Biology, Literature, Mathematics, Philosophy, Psychology, and the Psychology, and the Psychopathy of Language. This impact has created the need for an intellectual platform where all of these fields can come together for the purpose of exploring the ability of Man to manipulate symbols. Linguistic Inquiry will attempt to provide such a platform. (1) It is interesting to note that although the effect of the journal has been to build a forum for highly technical and inaccessible discussion among committed generative grammarians, the Statement of Purpose of LI claims that goal of the journal is to build interdisciplinarity. What’s more, while “exploring the ability of Man to manipulate symbols” is a seemingly stately goal — and seems to invite broader participation — it is certainly a much more lyrical approach to human language than has ever been adopted by Oenbring / 209 generative grammarians214 organized as a community of scholars by the autonomy of syntax thesis.215 Table 1 presents the findings of a short citation count study of references to Chomsky in the Linguistic Inquiry that I have conducted. In the study, I tallied the total number of citations of particular publications by Chomsky for entire years in the main research articles in Linguistic Inquiry. Measuring every five year from 1971 to 2006, the goal of the study is to gauge the influence of each of Chomsky’s publications at particular points in time. While the findings of the study are suggestive, the sample size is it too small to be conclusive; we cannot infer too much from the evidence presented. Nonetheless, it would be interesting to engage a similar study of patterns of citation in other linguistics journals. A particularly telling journal to focus on would be Language, the main journal of the Linguistic Society of America, a journal that has been in existence since the days of Bloomfield. With such a study, one could gauge the time at which Chomsky’s work became part of the mainstream of linguistics and the relative influence of Chomsky’s works upon the field over time. In fact, “the ability of Man to manipulate symbols” calls to mind rhetorician *gasp* Kenneth Burke’s definition of man as “the symbol using animal” (1966: 3). 215 It is also interesting to note that the first true article in Linguistic Inquiry is a piece of literary criticism by venerable old Jakobson, a piece that does not cite Chomsky at all, but is followed by several pieces beholden to Chomsky. In this regard, Jakobson’s article functions in a way as an epigraph. 214 Oenbring / 210 Citations of Chomsky by Publication by Year in Linguistic Inquiry Articles with no references to Chomsky Syntactic Structures (1957) "Finitary Models of Language Use" (1963) (with Miller) Current Issues in Linguistics Theory/"Logical Basis" (1964) "A Transformational Approach to Syntax" (1964) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) "Some Controversial Questions" (1965) (with Halle) "The Formal Nature of Language" (1967) Language and Mind (1968) The Sound Pattern of English (1968) (with Halle) "Some Empirical Issues" (1969) "Remarks on Nominalization" (1970) "Deep Structure, Surface Structure" (1970) Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (1972) "Conditions on Transformations" (1973) The Amherst Lectures (1974) "Questions of Form and Interpretation" (1974) The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1975) "Conditions on Rules of Grammar" (1976) Reflections on Language (1976) "Filters and Control" (1977) (with Lasnik) "On wh-movement" (1977) Rules on Representations 1971 1976 1981 1 1 1 3 2 1 5 5 1986 1991 1996 2001 2006 1 2 4 1 1 1 3 1 1 2 5 2 1 1 1 5 2 2 1 5 4 3 3 2 1 3 2 1 2 1 1 5 2 1 4 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 1 1 1 2 1 1 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 2 4 3 1 1 Oenbring / 211 (1980) "On binding" (1980) Lectures on Government and Binding (1981) "Markedness and Core Grammar" (1981) Some Concepts and Consequences (1982) Knowledge of Language (1986) Barriers (1986) "Some Notes on the Economy" (1991) "A Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory" (1993) "Bare phrase structure" (1994) The Minimalist Program (1995) (including 1993 w/ Lasnik) "Minimalist Inquiries: The Framework" (2000) "Derivations by Phase" (2001) 4 4 2 10 1 2 1 3 7 1 3 6 6 1 3 4 1 7 4 1 3 5 1 5 2 5 3 3 2 4 14 3 8 6 3 3 9 1 6 4 1 Table 1 Table 1 clearly supports the claim that certain of Chomsky’s texts have come to dominate the disciplinary imagination of technical generative linguistics at any one time. Note the relatively high number of citations of Aspects and SPE through the seventies up until the early eighties when Lectures on Government and Binding takes over. Lectures remains dominant until Chomsky begins to articulate his next epistemological rupture with his Minimalist Program. If total number of articles per year with no citations of Chomsky can be used to gauge the degree of Chomsky’s stranglehold on the disciplinary identity of generative linguistics, we can see three minor nadirs in Chomsky’s influence on the field: the late seventies through 1981 (the influence of Lectures cannot be gauged by articles published that calendar year), the early nineties (1991), and recently (2006). Oenbring / 212 Table 1 also provides empirical support for my claim that certain of Chomsky’s texts have had greater influence on broader academic audiences than they have had on practicing generative grammarians. Indeed, conspicuously lacking from the chart are pieces in what I call in this study Chomsky’s historical/philosophical genre, his texts aimed at a general academic audience (e.g., Cartesian Linguistics, Language and Mind, On Nature and Language). Despite the fact that Cartesian Linguistics and Language and Mind are, for certain, Chomsky’s two most important texts of sixties after Aspects and SPE, Table 1 shows only one citation of Language and Mind and none of Cartesian Linguistics for all the years covered. Linguistic Inquiry (Spring, 1986) The Spring, 1986 issue of Linguistic Inquiry contains four full research articles, and, as always, a “Remarks and Replies” section and a “Squibs and Discussion” section. However, I have limited the scope of my analysis to the research articles. These articles are: Epstein’s “The Local Binding Condition and LF Chains,” a piece that attempts to tweak a particular condition proposed by Chomsky; McCarthy’s “OCP Effects: Gemination and Antigemination,” a rather technical analysis of what is called the Obligatory Contour Principle in phonology; Williams’ “A Reassignment of the Functions of LF,” a piece that proposes a manipulation of a grammatical model that is itself a manipulation of the model presented in Lectures; and, finally, Woolford’s “The Distribution of Empty Nodes in Navajo: A Mapping Approach,” a piece that advocates the addition of a parameterized subsystem called mapping as a way to account for Oenbring / 213 empirical facts in a handful of different languages. In the following paragraphs I present a handful of specific rhetorical and textual features present in these articles that I believe to be representative of the broader genre of the generative research article. First and foremost, Epstein’s “The Local Binding Condition and LF Chains” is an attempt to redefine a notion that Chomsky first presents in a text that would become Knowledge of Language.216 Following common practice, the raison d’être of the piece is to fix a perceived problem in Chomsky’s governing work(s) of the time period; Epstein establishes the relevance of the analysis and grounds the piece by beginning the article by invoking recent work by Chomsky. Epstein begins the piece with the seemingly prosaic acknowledgement that “following Chomsky (1981), Chomsky (1984) proposes the following condition on chains … (1) The Local Binding Condition” (187). Epstein continues later on the same page, suggesting that “in this article I will attempt to reveal certain empirical problems that emerge under the Local Binding Condition. I will show that under a particular LF analysis proposed in Chomsky (1984), certain LF A-chains, required by the θ-Criterion, are incorrectly precluded by the Local Binding Condition” (187). As this suggests, the ultimate goal of the piece is to provide a new, alternative definition of local binding. While Epstein offers several other references to Chomsky, the article as a whole is more beholden to Chomsky than is apparent in the direct references. That is to say, the article is largely a confrontation and an elaboration on methods presented in Lectures and under the extended standard theory. After the introduction, the piece has four numbered 216 Epstein refers to Knowledge of Language here as “Chomsky (1984).” Oenbring / 214 subheading sections. These are: “1. Evidence for a Local Binding Condition,” where Epstein presents the rationales given for the Local Binding Condition in work by Chomsky’s collaborators Lasnik and Rizzi; “2. LF A-Chains,” where Epstein problematizes the Local Binding Condition as presented in Chomsky’s recent work, in its interaction with the equally theory-internal notion of LF; “3. Solutions,” where, not surprisingly, Epstein offers two possible ways to reformulate the Local Binding Condition; and, finally, “4. Summary and Discussion,” where Epstein engages in a brief, yet still highly technical, discussion of the broader implications of the findings of the piece for the GB / P and P model. While Epstein’s article is, for certain, ruled by the author’s novel interpretation throughout the piece, the setup of Epstein’s article, like many research articles in generative grammar, pays deference to the inductive-appearing setup of the IMRD217 research article used in many scientific fields.218 That is to say, Epstein’s piece moves from an analysis of methods at the beginning of the article to a specific finding/prescription nearing the end. Specifically, Epstein’s piece begins with an overview of current practice in the field (analogous to the introduction), continues with a long analysis of current research methods (somewhat analogous to methods), follows with a suggestion regarding how to improve current practice (this taking the place of the much less-judgment laden straightforward presentation of results in the scientific research article), and ends with a discussion of the broader relevance of theories Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion — sometimes preceded by an Abstract and/or followed by a Conclusion. 218 For more on the IMRD article, see Bazerman (1981). 217 Oenbring / 215 discussed (discussion). As such, the writing techniques of Epstein’s piece can be understood as a fusion of the evidence and reasoning techniques of exposition used academic articles in fields like mathematics and philosophy and the IMRD setup that rules natural science research articles.219 As the focus of McCarthy’s “OCP Effects” is explicitly on phonology, it is not surprising that the only piece by Chomsky that the piece cites is The Sound Pattern of English,220 the foundational text of generative phonology. This is true of many articles in generative phonology. McCarthy’s specific citation of SPE occurs as part of a discussion of the notion of evaluation metrics: Deriving the OCP from the evaluation metric runs into equally serious conceptual problems. Familiarity with the term “evaluation metric” has led to rather loose use of it – we forget that several very different, specific hypotheses have gone under this name. I assume, however, that the evaluation metric intended to derive the OCP is the one defined in Chomsky and Halle (1968), where the value of a grammar is inversely related to the number of nonredundant symbols (= features) in its rules and lexicon. Granted, counting phonological features alone give us the same result for (87a) and (87b) as the OCP (although as a preference rather than an absolute prohibition), but this is a perversion of Chomsky and Halle’s original intention. (254) 219 While similar section headings are common in articles in LI, such section headings are by no means necessary. 220 Indeed, my citation count study has suggested, not surprisingly, that if an article in Linguistic Inquiry only cites one publication by Chomsky, that publication is most likely to be SPE. Oenbring / 216 What McCarthy is lamenting here is other linguists’ “loose use” of the term evaluation metric, a notion institutionalized by SPE. McCarthy claims that these other interpretations are “a perversion of Chomsky and Halle’s original intention.” In effect, what McCarthy is suggesting here is that linguists having been using the notion of evaluation metric as what rhetorician Kenneth Burke has called a god-term,221 a vaguely defined term to which one must pay deference (e.g., freedom, justice). (Of course, godterm could easily be replaced by what I have called in this study Chomsky’s points of identity.) Nevertheless, McCarthy claims access to Chomsky and Halle’s original intentions in SPE, in order to support his own reading of the Obligatory Contour Principle. Like Epstein’s piece, the goal of Williams’ “The Reassignment of the Functions of LF” is to tinker with a model ultimately stemming from Chomsky’s Lectures (but in this case Williams is commenting on a variant of the model presented in Lectures presented in a 1981 article by Van Riemsdijk and Williams [what Williams refers to as “VR&W”]). Williams’ piece demonstrates clearly a stylistic tick common throughout generative grammar research articles (a tick common in Chomsky’s work as well): overuse of intialisms. Williams, for example, suggests without flinching that “we may think of SA and QR as deriving LF in the VR&W and GB accounts, respectively” (267). While such intialisms are clearly useful in helping generative grammarians avoid always restating full phraseology like the extended standard theory, we can certainly say that generative grammarians have fetishized these intialisms. Indeed, at times it seems that the 221 See, for example, Burke’s The Rhetoric of Religion. Oenbring / 217 only reason for generative grammarians use of these intialisms is to build scientific/technical allure of their analyses and/or to exclude outsiders from understanding their message.222 That is to say, one of the functions of these initialisms is to set up boundaries for the community of generative grammarians. Woolford’s “The Distribution of Empty Nodes in Navajo: A Mapping Approach” is an example of an article proposing a parameter (specifically in this case a parameterized subsystem) to Universal Grammar. In the piece, Woolford builds towering proposals based on analysis of a handful of constructions in disparate languages, all leading to a proposal to make an addition to the Lectures model. Woolford claims that “the Navajo data, along with similar unexplained restrictions on internal gaps in English, French, Toba Batak, and Modern Irish, can be accounted for in a straightforward manner within Government-Binding Theory (Chomsky [1981]) if one fairly simple parameterized subsystem, mapping, is added” (301). With any and all languages fair game for theory building, Woolford can cherry pick examples seemingly without bound. Nonetheless, in the end, the parameterized subsystem that Woolford suggests is rather abstract and theory internal. Other common features of research articles in Linguistic Inquiry that I have not touched on include: short paragraphs, due in part, but not in total, to large numbers of example sentences set off from the main body of the paragraph (Epstein’s piece has a ratio of 2.4 sentences per paragraph); numbered section headings, adding to the technical/scientific ethos of the work (this is stipulated by the Linguistic Inquiry style 222 Nevertheless, I, as you may have noticed, have also used these initialisms when I have found them convenient. Oenbring / 218 sheet); frequent use of branching syntactic trees; frequent use (and overuse) of Greek letters (following Chomsky); and, finally, appendices explaining in full, the details of models proposed in other articles that, if they had been included in the reasoning of the article proper, would have interrupted the flow of the reasoning (Willimas’ piece, for example, has two appendices outlining “Pesetsky’s [1985] Argument for LF” and “May’s [1985] Argument for LF”). Generative Grammar in Linguistics Textbooks Discipline fixes; it arrests or regulates movements; it clears up confusion; it dissipates compact groupings of individuals wandering about the country in unpredictable ways. Foucault, Discipline and Punish As many scholars have noted (see, for example, Loewen [1996]), textbooks serve an ideological function, legitimating the concerns of those with power; textbooks tell stories meant to authorize the concerns of those individuals and groups with power. Textbooks also bring order and intelligibility to academic fields: they constitute fields as disciplines. In this section, I attempt a brief genealogy of university linguistics textbooks (both general introductory textbooks and those with a specific focus on generative syntax) from Bloomfield’s Language on, paying special attention to what place Chomsky and generative grammar play in the texts. As my historical survey of linguistics textbooks demonstrates, the elements of Chomsky’s work that have been presented in general introductory textbooks have Oenbring / 219 remained largely unchanged since the early seventies; an accepted — and clearly ideological — distillation of the practices and methods of generative grammarians, developed for the purpose of teaching those methods to students, has been in place in linguistics textbooks since the sixties and seventies. This accepted distillation puts emphasis on several of the more simple and alluring elements of the model of generative grammar as presented by Chomsky in the fifties and sixties (specifically the notions of phrase structure rules, transformations, and surface structure / deep structure). These elements remain in current textbooks despite the fact that many of these elements were reformulated by Chomsky decades ago and are no longer central elements of current practice. Furthermore, introductory linguistics textbooks seem to overrepresent the importance of Syntactic Structures; Chomsky’s 1957 book has served as a stabilized point of origin/identity in telling the story of generative grammar to initiates even long after the book has ceased to hold an important place in technical scholarship. (Indeed, Syntactic Structures hardly shows up in my citation study of technical articles.) Accordingly, the sixties and seventies are overrepresented in my sample, as that is the time that this ideological formation developed. Although not explicitly designed for pedagogical purposes, Bloomfield’s 1933 masterpiece Language served for a generation as the most important North American linguistics textbook.223 A useful introduction to linguistics even today, Language has specific chapters devoted to almost every major topic of study in contemporary linguistics, with dedicated chapters focusing on all of the following: phonemes; phonetics 223 In fact, Language is still in print today. Oenbring / 220 (in a chapter called “Types of Phonemes”); morphology; semantics; dialect geography; sound change; the Comparative Method (basically 19th century historical linguistics); speech communities (an early form of what would later be called sociolinguistics); borrowing; writing systems; and, yes, even syntax. That is to say, Language established the standard and many of the conventions for the genre of linguistics textbooks.224 It is an interesting (and, as I note later, quite ironic) fact that in all probability, the first linguistics textbook to present an element of Chomsky’s work is Hockett’s 1958 A Course in Modern Linguistics.225 Ambitious in scope, it is clear that the goal of Hockett’s book is to be its generation’s Language. Hockett’s probable presentation of Chomsky’s work takes place in a chapter surprisingly titled “Surface and Deep Grammar.”226 (Recall that Chomsky did not use the terms surface structure and deep structure in print until Current Issues and Aspects.) In this particular chapter, Hockett divides between surface grammar (“the most apparent layer” in “network of structural relationships between forms” [249]) and deep grammar (which has “much to do with how we speak and understand but which [is] still largely unexplored, in any systematic way, by grammarians” [249]). The main examples that Hockett focuses on come from Chinese, and these examples do not appear indebted to Chomsky’s works. The few examples from English that Hockett offers are, however, suggestive (see, for example, Hockett’s Bloch and Trager’s 1942 Outline of Linguistic Analysis, a definitive textbook of the postBloomfieldian era, pares the number of topics approached down to a core set of formal methods. Bloch and Trager devote specific chapters to phonetics, phonemics, morphology and syntax (with more space devoted to the former two topics, in accord with post-Bloomfieldian concerns). 225 I say in all probability because there is no definitive evidence to prove that Hockett was attempting to present a version of Chomsky’s framework. 226 While other scholars have noted the strangeness of the appearance of this divide in Hockett’s 1958 book (see, for example, Lee (1996: 58), Newmeyer (1980 [1986: 74]), and Graffi (2001: 218), none have offered a satisfactory explanation for its appearance. 224 Oenbring / 221 analyses of she’s singing and she’s running). As Graffi notes, Hockett’s concerns in the chapter appear “very similar to transformational treatments” (Graffi 218) (i.e., those models proposed by Chomsky). Nevertheless, Hockett makes no direct references to Chomsky (or any other scholars) in the chapter227 (despite listing Syntactic Structures as a reference in the bibliography, a book cited no place else in the text). Recall that the affix-hopping model presented in Syntactic Structures encoded in a very real way a version of what would eventually become the deep structure / surface structure dichotomy. That is to say, it certainly is possible that Hockett’s chapter was directly inspired by Syntactic Structures, a book published the year before. What exactly inspired Hockett to write his chapter on “Surface and Deep Grammar,” we can never know. Nevertheless, I would like to make a cautious proposal that Hockett what is engaging in the “Surface and Deep Grammar” chapter is, in part, distilling Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures model for presentation to an audience of non-linguists.228 Of course, that Hockett may have been the first expositor of Chomsky’s work for a non-academic audience is quite ironic, seeing that much of Hockett’s scholarship from the sixties on was devoted to arguing against Chomsky’s program. Following this proposal further, we are led to the possibility that Chomsky himself may have been inspired by Hockett’s divide between surface grammar and deep grammar in his later formulation of the surface structure / deep structure dichotomy (for evidence see Current 227 However, due to the pedagogical nature of the text, Hockett gives very few references to primary sources anywhere in the book. 228 Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is another possible source for the notion of “deep grammar,” but it is not listed as a source in Hockett’s book. Oenbring / 222 Issues 30).229 That is to say, there is a good possibility that one of Chomsky’s most famous ideas was, in fact, first formulated (admittedly in protean form230) by a linguist who spent most of his later career critiquing Chomsky in order to facilitate that linguist in explaining Chomsky’s ideas to an audience of non-specialists; it is possible that the surface structure / deep structure dichotomy itself is, in large part, a popularization. While the evidence that Hockett’s deep grammar was an attempt to popularize the specific model presented in Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures is only suggestive (but is, nonetheless the hypothesis that I favor), there is, however, more evidence to suggest that Hockett’s deep grammar model is something developed specifically for the purpose of presenting then contemporary grammatical theory to an audience of students. For one, Hockett admits that the related notion of valence231 also presented in the “Surface Grammar” chapter is “not technical” and is also “metaphorical” (249); Hockett more or less admits that he is uses a key term in the “Surface Grammar” chapter specifically for the purpose of explanation. What’s more, despite asserting that what he is offering is not popularization, Hockett notes in the preface of A Course that he has taken some creative license with current scholarship, presumably for the purposes of presenting current linguists’ methods to an audience of non-specialists. Hockett states in the preface that: 229 Indeed, Chomsky notes in Current Issues that the divide between surface grammar and deep grammar is analogous to the divide between observational and descriptive adequacy. Specifically, Chomsky sates that “the difference between observational and descriptive adequacy is related to the distinction drawn by Hockett (1958) between “surface grammar” and “deep grammar”, and he is unquestionably correct in noting that modern linguistics is largely confined in scope to the former” (30). 230 i.e., deep grammar rather than deep structure 231 The notion of valence can, however, be traced back to the work of Tesnière (see, for example, [1953] and [1959]). Oenbring / 223 This book is intended for those college students who take an introductory course in linguistics. If others find interest or entertainment in the work, the author will be delighted; but it is not a “popularization,” … The duty of the writer of a textbook is not to explore frontiers or indulge in flights of fancy, but to present, in as orderly a way as he can, the generally accepted facts and principles of the field. Nonetheless — and for this I must apologize — on some topics my enthusiasm and involvement have certainly led me to speak more emphatically than our current knowledge warrants. (vii) Throughout his career, Hockett cultivated the rhetorical persona of a crusty old conservative, and this quote no doubt makes moves in that direction. Nevertheless, in a fascinating rhetorical maneuver, Hockett invokes the crusty old conservative, all while admitting that he is going to take creative liberties and “speak more emphatically than our current knowledge warrants.”232 As the sixties went on, textbooks began to present Chomsky’s technical model in more depth, increasingly tying that model to Chomsky’s person. Gleason’s (1961) textbook An Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics, the second edition of a book originally published in 1955, is a good example of early sixties reception of Chomsky in textbooks. Paying attention to recent developments in the field, the second edition Newmeyer’s brief analysis of Hockett’s “Surface and Deep Grammar” chapter, furthermore, leads directly into an analysis of the ideological effects that the notion of deep structure may invite among an audience of non-specialists. Newmeyer suggests that: Even Charles Hockett (1958: 246) had (uncharacteristically) referred to the “deep grammar” of a sentence, as distinct from its “surface grammar.” Nevertheless, the term “deep structure” has had the unfortunate effect of inviting a metaphorical interpretation by the linguistically unsophisticated. (74) 232 Oenbring / 224 includes revised chapters devoted to each of syntax and transformations. Although the version of the transformations presented by the book appears to be a mix of Harris’ and Chomsky’s attitudes toward transformations, Gleason maintains that model presented is primarily owing to Chomsky (492). Nevertheless, while Gleason claims to present Chomsky’s methods, the text does not by any means go out of its way to enact deference to Chomsky; the text does not authorize the methods that it presents on the basis of the fact that they stem from Chomsky. The first specialized textbook focused on presenting generative grammar is Bach’s An Introduction to Transformational Grammar (1964), a volume that makes clear from the beginning that it is beholden to Chomsky, in particular the model of Syntactic Structures. In fact, the preface of the book begins, “since the publication of Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures in 1957” (v). While Bach’s textbook includes a handful of displays of deference to Chomsky’s person, with the whole book being largely a presentation of the model of Syntactic Structures, Bach does not legitimate the findings presented in the book because they come from Chomsky as an individual. That is to say, unlike many later linguistics textbooks, the mode of exposition of Bach’s book is not here’s what Chomsky believes and you should learn it. Following the narrative arch presented in Syntactic Structures, Bach’s Introduction offers a complete chapter on “Phrase Structure Rules,” only to problematize the limitations of such rules nearing the end of the section. Like in Syntactic Structures, however, a chapter on “Grammatical Transformations” swoops in in order to save the model from collapse. (Recall that phrase structure rules were, in large part, created by the Oenbring / 225 mid-fifties Chomsky as something to argue against; phrase structure rules were largely a rhetorically-created straw man that Chomsky developed to facilitate his exposition in Syntactic Structures.) While Bach’s extended presentation of the model presented in Syntactic Structures in his 1964 Introduction is understandable given that Chomsky had yet to release his defining publications of the sixties (Aspects and SPE), other textbooks have maintained Bach’s expository technique (of focusing on phrase structure rules followed by transformations — what I call the Syntactic Structures narrative) well past the end of Syntactic Structure’s dominance of the methods of generative grammarians. Indeed, the revolution, specifically located in the publication of Syntactic Structures, has become oft-promoted point of origin/identity in introductory linguistics textbooks.233 What Bach’s Introduction had done for Syntactic Structures, Jacobs and Rosenbaum’s 1968 English Transformational Grammar did for the Aspects model. While the terminology is updated to reflect Chomsky’s mid-sixties concerns, the book is as a whole similar to Bach’s. The book as a whole foregrounds what I have called the ideological distillation of Chomsky’s work: its central leitmotifs are the notions of transformations and the surface structure / deep structure divide. English Transformational Grammar seems particularly enamored with the notion of deep structure; it serves as the goal of the examples presented. Indeed, the end of chapter Of course, not all textbooks in the sixties place great emphasis on Chomsky’s project and person. Robbins’ 1965 textbook General Linguistics: An Introductory Survey, for example, only speaks of Chomsky or his project four times, with two of these being in footnotes. Robbins offers a brief discussion of “Transformational Analysis,” but what he describes is much closer to Harris’ version of the transformation than Chomsky’s. Hughes’ The Science of Language (1962) makes no mention of Chomsky’s work, but lists Syntactic Structures as suggested further reading. 233 Oenbring / 226 exercises of Jacobs and Rosenbaum’s textbook are chock full of examples that ask the student to do something like “show in how the deep structure for 2c is converted into the surface structure” (126). Like Bach’s Introduction, the Jacobs and Rosenbaum’s book is more in debt to Chomsky than is apparent from the authors’ early direct nods to Chomsky (see viii and 4). For example, Jacobs and Rosenbaum make it clear in the preface that the goal of transformational grammar is to uncover “the set of principles, called linguistic universals, which allow us to describe what we, as native speakers of English, know about our language intuitively” (v). This is phrasing more or less directly borrowed from Chomsky.234 However, as Chomsky was not yet a pan-academic authority, Jacobs and Rosenbaum do not authorize these claims by stating their origin. Starting with Lyons’ Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics (1969) introductory textbooks began to tie the specific models they present to Chomsky’s own person and authority; Chomsky had, by the late sixties, become a pan-academic authority. For example, in the preface Lyons maintains that he gives “full account of” what he calls “Chomsky’s system of transformational grammar” (x); Lyons legitimates the system he presents based on the fact that it stems from Chomsky’s own person. However, Lyons — a scholar who would go on to write the early hagiographic history of generative grammar What’s more, at several point in the text, Jacobs and Rosenbaum make the claim that recent discoveries by generative grammarians are recovering a line of inquiry into the study of language that has its origin in Descartes, claims made by Chomsky in 1966 popular-focused text Cartesian Linguistics. Jacobs and Rosenbaum claim, also invoking what historians of generative grammar have called the eclipsing stance, for example, that “more has been learned in the past fifteen years about the organization of human linguistic knowledge than any time since the seventeenth century when similar questions were addressed by French philosophers and grammarians under the intellectual leadership of Descartes” (vi). 234 Oenbring / 227 Noam Chomsky (1970) — goes further than Bach; Lyons ties the legitimacy of the methods he presents to Chomsky’s person as he presents them across the text, not just in the early pages of the book.235 By the 1970s, displays of deference to Chomsky had become established conventions, part and parcel of how generative grammar was presented to students in many linguistics textbooks. Indeed, such displays of deference became an integral element of the maturing genre of introductory linguistics textbooks, a genre that remains largely the same today. A nice example of this solidifying genre is Elgin’s 1973 volume What is Linguistics?.236 Like previous linguistics textbooks, Elgin’s chapter on syntax includes: a specific display of deference to Chomsky, and the Syntactic Structures-type narrative (specifically, a heading analyzing “Phrase Structure Grammar” leading to a heading devoted to “Deep Structure, Surface Structure, and Transformation”). Moreover, like many later textbooks, one of the primary goals of Elgin’s syntax chapter seems to be presenting Chomsky’s distinctive terminology (i.e., what I have elsewhere in this study called his points of identity and/or his god-terms). For example, Elgin devotes a 235 Lyons devotes a solid fifty pages on generative grammar within a long chapter devoted to “Grammatical Structure,” using, like Bach, the Syntactic Structures model as a point of origin/identity. Starting with Bloomfield’s theory of immediate constituents, a theory originally suggested in Language (itself a quasi-pedagogical text), Lyons guides the reader in “Grammatical Structure” through phrase structure rules, transformations, etc., eventually ending with an extended presentation of the analysis of the passive transformation presented in Syntactic Structures. The result is a narrative similar to Bach’s. However, unlike Bach, Lyons, as I have suggested, makes references to Chomsky throughout the chapter. 236 Elgin’s relatively brief book is divided into nine chapters, covering: phonology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, stylistics, and applied linguistics. Oenbring / 228 prominent place early in the chapter to the divide between competence and performance. Later in the chapter Elgin devotes a section to the notion of universal grammar.237 With Chomsky’s star on the rise across the academy, not just in linguistics, textbooks in adjacent fields began to display deference to Chomsky and to make appeals to Chomsky’s authority. Thomas’ Transformational Grammar and Teacher of English (1965) and Liebert’s Linguistics and the New English Teacher (1971) are good examples of volumes designed for courses preparing English teachers with a central focus on presenting generative grammar — with Liebert’s text being perhaps right after the apogee of Chomsky’s prestige in these surrounding fields (i.e., it can be seen as the rear bookend).238 Following the pattern of other introductory linguistics textbooks, Liebert’s book presents its own more fully explained and fleshed out version of the Syntactic Structures model. However, Liebert ends his analysis of generative grammar by hedging, stating in full caps that “THUS FAR I HAVE SEEN NO CONVINCING EVIDENCE It is also interesting to note that Elgin includes several quotes from Chomsky’s Language and Mind (1968), his most famous book where he attempts to describe his theories of language to an audience of non-linguists. This is a trick of exposition that has been picked up by many other writers of linguistics textbooks (e.g., Akmajian [1979: xiv], Radford [1998]). 238 Indeed, with generative grammar at an apogee of its prestige, there was widespread optimism in the late sixties and early seventies that explicit teaching of generative grammar could actually help students read and write better. After all, such teaching would merely be unlocking codes already present in students’ brains. Accordingly, exploring the practical side of generative grammar became the proper object for Ph.D. dissertations in both English and Education studies. Along the way, generative grammar spawned its own genre of social science sausage factory dissertation. Education dissertations abounded with titles like: Tavano (1968) The Efficacy of Administering a Program in Transformational Grammar in Relationship to Composition at the Junior High School Level; Chandler (1969) The Effect of a Knowledge of Transformational Grammar upon the Sentence Development of the Junior High School Student; Wills (1969) A Study of the Effects of Learning Certain Aspects of Transformational Grammar upon the Science Reading Comprehension of Fifth Grade Pupils; Ross (1970) The Effects of Transformational Grammar Instruction upon the Sentence Structure of Ninth Grade Students; and Fry (1971) The Effects of Transformational Grammar upon the Writing Performance of Students of Low Socioeconomic Backgrounds. 237 Oenbring / 229 THAT KNOWLEDGE OF GRAMMAR RULES IS NECESSARY FOR GOOD USAGE” (196). Indeed, despite early optimism that generative grammar, by unlocking biological codes already present in children’s minds, would finally get them kids to write good, by the mid-seventies much of this confidence that generative grammar had much to offer language and writing instruction had collapsed. As I have suggested, many of the features of the genre of the basic introductory linguistics textbook have remained unchanged since the seventies. A good example of a recent broad introductory linguistics textbook is the eighth edition of Language Files (2001), put out by the linguistics department of the Ohio State University. Starting in 1977 as a collection of supplementary handouts, Language Files has, over the years, added more and more traditional textbook apparatus. The eighth edition includes the following “files” (i.e., chapters): Introductions, Animal Communication, Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics, Pyscholinguistics, Language Variation, Language Contact, Language Change, Visual Languages, Language and Computers, and Language in a Wider Context. (It is interesting to compare these chapter topics with those of Bloomfield’s Language.) While early textbooks such as Bach’s Introduction and Jacobs and Rosenbaum’s Transformational Grammar present models beholden to Chomsky throughout, and make displays of deference, usually in the preface, to Chomsky, throughout most of these early textbooks the authors do not legitimate the methods that they present based on the fact that the models come from Chomsky. Nonetheless, these texts worked to build the foundations of a tradition in linguistics textbooks to claim legitimacy for methods due to Oenbring / 230 their association with Chomsky. Since the early seventies, there have been two unique rhetorical strategies that broad introductory textbooks have used for dealing with the fact that they are essentially presenting the theories of single individual. One strategy is to actively defer extensively to Chomsky: to treat him as a sage leader. The other is to normalize the theories presented by avoiding tying the models to Chomsky’s person: to present the theories presented as the established and unauthored findings of a scientific field. For example, following the established distillation of Chomsky’s work I have presented, the syntax chapter of Language Files 8 includes specific sub-files on both phrase structure rules and transformations. Like Elgin’s What is Linguistics?, one of the primary goals of the syntax and psycholinguistics chapters is to introduce the student to Chomsky’s distinctive concepts and phrases (e.g., recursion, transformation, surface structure / deep structure, and Universal Grammar). However, despite using such obviously Chomskyan vocabulary, Language Files 8 avoids explicitly tying the methods it is presenting to Chomsky’s person. It presents Chomsky’s ideas as the unauthored findings of a scientific field. Since Bach (1964) giving students an introduction to generative grammar had the proper object for entire linguistics textbooks (presumably for specific courses on generative grammar). While all contemporary textbooks giving an introduction to orthodox generative grammar demonstrate deference to Chomsky in some form, some linguistics textbooks are, as Language Files 8 demonstrates, less keen on fanning the flames of the master’s cult of personality than others. A good example of one of these Oenbring / 231 less directly obsequious textbooks designed for the purposes of giving students a direct introduction to generative grammar is Haegeman’s Introduction to Government and Binding Theory, a book meant, as the name suggests, to introduce the student to GB / P and P theory. First published in 1991 and in its second edition since 1994, Haegeman’s Introduction offers students an overview of the main features GB / P and P theory as defined by Chomsky in Lectures (e.g., case theory and theta theory), but largely avoids, after the introduction, tying the models presented to Chomsky (or any other scholar); the models presented are, largely, unauthored. Haegeman paints theoretical constructs as the established, unauthored findings of a scientific field. 239 An example of a more obsequious contemporary textbook giving an introduction specifically to generative grammar is Radford’s broadly-used Transformational Grammar (1988 [1998]). The overriding goal of Transformational Grammar (as well as his more recent Minimalist Syntax [2004]) is clear: to actively convince you to believe what the master does. From first page of the main body of the text on, Radford surrounds the reader in Chomsky’s god-terms / distinctive terminology. In fact, the second sentence of the first chapter is: “among the notions which will be explained in this chapter are terms such as theory of language, grammar of a language, particular/universal grammar, competence, performance, grammaticality, linguistic intuition, rule-governed creativity, generate, observational/descriptive/explanatory adequacy, constraint, markedness, and Nevertheless, the introduction of the book states clearly that “the purpose of this book is to provide and introduction to the mainline version of Government and Binding Theory, or GBtheory, using as a basis Noam Chomsky’s more recent writings” (xx). 239 Oenbring / 232 innateness” (1). As you no doubt now recognize, most of these terms stem directly from Chomsky — and Radford makes sure that readers of his book know this. Demonstrating rhetorical awareness, Radford includes numerous large quotes pulled directly from Chomsky’s publications aimed at a general academic audience, a trick common throughout the genre of linguistics textbooks. The most notable of these sources is Chomsky’s influential book Language and Mind (1968 [1972]). Radford presents the following visionary quote from Chomsky’s Language and Mind on the first page of his textbook: There are a number of questions which might lead one to undertake a study of language. Personally, I am primarily intrigued by the possibility of learning something, from the study of language that will bring to light inherent properties of the human mind. (Chomsky 1968 [1972: 103], qtd. in Radford 1988 [1998: 1]) With such attention paid to presentation of Chomsky’s terminology and bold, alluring ideas, the first chapter of Radford’s book actually closely mirrors what I have called the world creation pages of Chomsky’s mid-sixties works. Moreover, following Chomsky, Radford sets up mentalism as a central point of disciplinary identity for scientific linguistic, tying this interest in mentalism directly to Chomsky’s person. Still on the first page, Radford suggests that “but why should we be interested in the phenomenon of Language? Chomsky gives and avowedly mentalist answer to this question” (1, emphasis Radford’s). Radford’s book is chocked full of interchanges like this where the possible beliefs or assumptions of a student/reader are stated in one sentence, only to refute those beliefs Oenbring / 233 by invoking Chomsky’s authority in the next sentence.240 Later on in the first chapter, Radford suggests, for example, that “even if the idea of constraining a grammar or theory is relatively easy to understand, we might still ask why it is important to do so. Chomsky’s answer is that only a maximally constrained theory of language can lead to the development of an adequate theory of language acquisition” (34). Indeed, at times Radford’s exposition seems vaguely reminiscent of a Platonic dialogue, where the reader plays the interlocutor/Sophist in need of refuting by Chomsky/Socrates. This quasiPlatonic dialogue technique of exposition (what one might also refer to as a I-will-refuteyour-common-sense-by-invoking-the-master method) has been picked up by other linguistics textbooks. Indeed, it is a not-infrequent feature of the genre.241 Conclusion As Foucault reminds us in his famous essay “What is an Author?”, contemporary scientific knowledge is not supposed to be built on the authority of individuals; science is supposedly unauthored. As we have seen, some scholars have tried to avoid making extensive appeals to Chomsky’s authority to undergird their claims. Such maneuvers are no doubt, in part, rhetorical maneuvers to make their findings appear unauthored (i.e., the findings of an established scientific field). Nevertheless, Chomsky’s person has, over the decades, played an important role in undergirding claims both within the technical scholarship of generative grammarians and within textbooks aimed at expressing the 240 These possible beliefs of the reader can either be presented as questions or stated positively. In fact, Uriagereka’s 1998 textbook supporting the Minimalist Program Rhyme and Reason actually is in the form of a Platonic dialogue, with the (orthodox Chomskyan) Linguist leading a discussion with (and ultimately refuting) the smart but misguided non-linguist Other. 241 Oenbring / 234 findings of the field to initiates; Chomsky’s person has played an important role both in technical scholarship and in popularization. Indeed, it is clear that appeals to Chomsky’s person have played an important role in constituting the community of generative grammar, a group of linguistics that have had a seeming stranglehold on the identity of ‘scientific’ linguistics for decades. Of course, how these appeals to Chomsky’s authority and person work in the technical scholarship versus popular-audience focused writing such as textbooks are fundamentally different. Whereas generative grammarians in their technical scholarship frame their project as developing one of the elements of Chomsky’s current model, textbook writers often defer directly to the master, engaging, as it were, in advocacy for Chomsky. As Chomsky plays a special ideological role in the field of generative grammar, it has been important that student-initiates to the community of generative linguists (i.e., the next generation of the professoriate) learn this special place in order to maintain order in the community. Linguistics textbooks, as I hope to have shown, have played this function well. Accordingly, we must acknowledge that linguistics textbooks (as they have produced cohort after cohort of professoriate) have served to support the technical inquiry of generative grammarians in itself; we must acknowledge that popularizations such as textbooks have been more than just parasitic to the technical knowledge production. What’s more, as my analysis of these genres suggests, Chomsky’s project and person has in both of these forms of writing served as the lynchpin of the community of generative grammarians; without Chomsky the field would seemingly dissolve into mysteries. Oenbring / 235 Chapter 6: The Textual Dynamics of Generative Grammar, Part II: Chomsky’s Genres Modern studies of animal communication so far offer no counterevidence to the Cartesian assumption that human language is based on an entirely distinct principle. Cartesian Linguistics, 1966 I will be using the terms “mind” and “mental” here with no metaphysical import. Thus I understand “mental” to be on par with “chemical,” “optical” and “electrical.” New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, 2000 Introduction As I have noted, Chomsky has at several points looked outside linguistics for frames in which to legitimate his work in the study of language. For example, Chomsky’s first appeals to the language of philosophy (specifically to symbolic logic) in the fifties were largely designed to offer an accepted set of methods to his studies of syntax; Chomsky’s original appeals to philosophy were attempts to capture a supposedly rigorous formal metadiscourse to ground his methods for studying human language. This technique of building authority in certain domains by making appeals to others is, in fact, a technique that Chomsky has used throughout his career. Indeed, starting with his famous 1959 review of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior242— and more prominently after his early sixties joint publications with Miller (e.g., 1963), Chomsky and his followers One should note that Chomsky’s review was first published in the journal Language (i.e., for an audience of linguists). 242 Oenbring / 236 have — at least implicitly — claimed the authority of the tradition of psychological inquiry. For example, in 1968’s Language and Mind, what would prove to be his most influential book written for a general academic audience, Chomsky famously suggested that linguistics should be viewed as a “branch of cognitive psychology” (76). (However, unlike his early use of formal logic, Chomsky’s later discovery of psychology has always been more of a sacredly-guarded point of identity than a genuine appropriation of the methods of a different field; despite generative grammarians’ claims that their field is a branch of cognitive psychology, the methods of psychology proper have always had little to no genuine effect on the actual work of generative grammarians. Nonetheless, deference to the psychological [read: biological] implications of their findings permeates both the technical discourse of generative grammarians and broader discourse surrounding generative grammar; Chomsky has been largely successful in promoting this identity for generative grammar and linguistics as a whole.)243 By identifying his work with both the field of psychology and the field of linguistics, Chomsky has, in a way, been able to make his work beyond the fray in a way in both fields; just as Chomsky can wow budding linguists with the psychological / biological claims of his work, he can silence the psychologist with his inaccessible technical analyses of language (after all, he is a linguist). The same impossibility for refutation is true for Chomsky’s interventions in philosophical discourse as well; philosophers can’t refute him because he’s a linguist, and linguists can’t refute him 243 Nevertheless, Chomsky has at several points in his career, but mostly commonly in the late sixties and early seventies, expressed thinly-veiled contempt for the discipline of psychology, particularly its behaviorist variant, setting up Skinner and behaviorism as bogeymen (see, for example, “Psychology and Ideology.”) Oenbring / 237 because he’s a philosopher. Indeed, using authority given to him by his inquiries into certain domains in order to support his claims in other domains is a technique that Chomsky has used throughout his career; it is a rhetorical strategy he has used to build his authority in multiple areas, including: linguistics, philosophy, broad academic discourse, and even political discourse. As I have noted, Chomsky has never been satisfied merely being the most influential living scholar of human language within the field of linguistics. Just as Chomsky has made appeals outside the study of language to build his authority within the field of linguistics, he has also in publications aimed outside the field of linguistics used his authority as a famous linguist to authorize his statements in these neighboring fields. However, like any broadly successful academic rhetor, Chomsky has had to make his work accord with needs of these broader communities when presenting his technical work to them. In engaging in these reformulations, Chomsky has taken liberties with claims made in his technical scholarship. The specific rhetorical strategies that Chomsky has used in order to meet with the needs of (and manage the concerns of) these various communities is the primary focus of this chapter.244 244 Of course, a more sympathetic account might suggest that Chomsky attempts to spread his message to broader academic audiences and popular audiences out of his love for humanity. Barksy, for example, suggests in his hagiographic The Chomsky Effect that: his teaching and lecturing styles reflect [his] views as well, something that is evident from his paying attention to and taking seriously the views of all persons. Given this stance, the idea of a ‘popularizer’ does not refer to the messenger who comes down from the mount to explain to the ignorant masses the meanings of his (or others’) great teachings; instead, he speaks to others on the basis of his direct experience with the matters at hand and he seeks out the opinions of those with whom he is engaged. (40) While Barsky is correct to suggest that Chomsky can, in person, seem disarmingly modest, his assessment that Chomsky produces his claims largely out of dialogue with others (i.e., that “he seeks out the opinions of those with whom he is engaged”) clearly is an overstatement. Oenbring / 238 Specifically, in this chapter I analyze the techniques that Chomsky himself has used in order reframe his technical scholarship in order to present it to a general academic audience. In order to do this, I juxtapose and analyze his technical texts in comparison to his set of texts aimed at a general academic audience (what I call in this chapter his historical/philosophical genre). Later on in this chapter, I trace — and explain the rhetorical purpose of — a specific dramatic change in Chomsky’s historical/philosophical texts over the past decades: Chomsky has gone from associating generative grammar with dualist philosophers like Descartes and Plato, as he did from the sixties through the eighties, to, in the last decade, associating his work with a monist (i.e., a more traditional scientific) perspective. At the end of this chapter, I present the findings of a short corpus study presenting some quantitative empirical measures of three corpora of Chomsky’s texts that I have developed. The three genres represented with their own corpus are: Chomsky’s technical texts, his historical/philosophical texts, and his political texts. I present these measures in order to flesh out my analyses of the differing styles of Chomsky’s different genres. While corpus studies do have their own limitations, including being limited by the practitioners of the studies’ choices for what to include in the corpora, oftentimes producing more banal than interesting findings, I have included the corpus study in the interest of including more empirically scrupulous methods than I do other places in this study. The textual features that I search the corpora for include statistics such as average sentence length, keywords (common words in one corpus in comparison to another), and 3-grams (reoccurring strings of three words). Oenbring / 239 Genre vs. Register As I have previously argued, to suggest that Chomsky has several genres available in his repertoire is not merely to suggest that he has had several unique topics of which he has been concerned about across his career (i.e., language and politics) nor is it merely to throw a label on bodies of text. Indeed, close attention to Chomsky’s body of work suggests that he enacts diverse rhetorical strategies when writing for different audiences, a habit that he has maintained for decades. Nevertheless, using the term genre to refer to the publications of a particular rhetor has two broad problems. First of all, the very notion of genre as it is used by contemporary rhetoricians is deeply tied to language as a social fact: it describes habituated patterns of action of significantly sized groups of people, not individuals. Second of all, the concept of genre necessarily draws clean divides between groups of texts, and is seemingly unable to account for rhetors’ ability to strategically build hybrid or mixed-genre texts. As Derrida (1980), always a wicked ironist, reminds us, “genres are not to be mixed.” A related notion to the concept of genre at use among contemporary rhetoricians and functional linguists that can seemingly solve the latter but not the former of these problems is the notion of register, what Halliday (1994 [2004]), defines as “the patterns of instantiation of the overall system associated with a given type of context” (27). This definition is quite vague, but is potentially useful to us in its nonspecific nature. Basically register refers to the stylistic features of given community or context of writing and speaking (for example, we can refer to technical or scientific registers). The difference between register and genre is that genre, unlike register must be tied to a particular group Oenbring / 240 of texts or speech patterns. For example, the scientific research article and the review article are distinct genres, but they both deploy or provide instantiations of a scientific register. While I use the term genre to refer to Chomsky’s separate bodies of work, I recognize that a more appropriate term may be register. First of all, the texts that I place under the same genre are by no means homogenous. For example, in this study I place both of Chomsky’s recent texts New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind (2000) and On Nature and Language (2002) within what I call Chomsky’s historical/philosophical genre despite the fact that the two texts do not have exactly the same audience.245 Nevertheless, these texts use very similar techniques of exposition (in this case, positioning the project of generative grammar against several major figures in early modern philosophy); I believe that there are convincing reasons to theorize these texts as members of the same genre. Moreover, Chomsky routinely uses language from one particular genre in others. For example, the early world creation pages of technical texts such as Aspects and Current Issues have a fair portion of historical/philosophical argumentation. Although both Aspects and Current Issues can safely be placed in the technical genre, both have some historical/philosophical argumentation; if we were focusing on the notion of register in this study, we could easily take note of the fact that both Aspects and Current Issues at points use a historical/philosophical register — in addition to a technical register. Nonetheless, in the interests of terminological continuity 245 Whereas On Nature and Language is the product of a series of public lectures by Chomsky and is directed at a broad academic audience, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind is a more direct intervention in philosophical conversations. Oenbring / 241 between this chapter and the previous chapter, I have decided to stick mostly with the term genre. Domains of Authority and Textual Form An interesting example of Chomsky using the conventions and claims of widely different domains in support of the program of generative grammar is his work in the late 1960s to whip up a broad panic about behaviorist psychology, a technique that he used, in part, to further marginalize the post-Bloomfieldian linguists. This case is particularly interesting, in that it manifested itself in across Chomsky’s diverse body of public writing, showing up in different forms in all of his genres, including: his technical texts, his texts aimed a general academic audience, and even in his political texts. Chomsky uses the conventions of these disparate domains of discourse — and the prerogatives afforded rhetors in these varying domains of discourse — all in support of the project of generative grammar.246 As I have previously suggested, one of Chomsky’s favorite central themes when he tells the history of linguistics is the idea that generative theories led to a profound epistemological break with previous post-Bloomfieldian scholarship. Accordingly, throughout the sixties, Chomsky often created straw man of the post-Bloomfiedians, lumping them together as a single group tainted by a behaviorist outlook — a group that Moreover, the cross-generic nature of Chomsky’s campaign against behaviorism in the late sixties is especially interesting in that Chomsky generally suggests that there are no compelling similarities between his politics and his linguistics. 246 Oenbring / 242 demonstrated an obsession with data collection at the expense of rich universals.247 In the technical literature, Chomsky’s attacks against the post-Bloomfieldians are largely limited to suggesting that their work is uninspired and unenlightening; the work of structuralist linguists is descriptive, not positing rich universals. The following passage comes from the early, world creation pages of Aspects: A fully adequate grammar must assign to each of an infinite range of sentences a structural description indicating how this sentence is understood by the ideal speaker-hear. This is the traditional problem of descriptive linguistics, and traditional grammars give a wealth of information concerning structural descriptions of sentences. However, valuable as they obviously are, traditional grammars are deficient in that they leave unexpressed many of the basic regularities of the language with which they are concerned. This fact is particular clear on the level of syntax, where no traditional or structuralist grammar goes beyond classification of particular examples to the stage of formulation of generative rule on any significant scale. (4-5) This quote is interesting in that Chomsky compares the work of the post-Bloomfieldians with traditional pedagogical and prescriptive grammar in order to suggest the banality of the post-Bloomfieldians’ work; post-Bloomfieldian work is taxonomic, not explanatory. 247 While Chomsky construed the older generation of linguists as a single group, he, however, used several different terms to refer to the post-Bloomfieldians, including: descriptive linguistics, anti-mentalist linguistics, and structural linguistics (a term commonly used to in the history of linguistics to refer to the post-Bloomfielians). (Of course, the terms that Chomsky uses to refer to the post-Bloomfieldians in his various texts can be connected to the differing audiences and differing rhetorical situations of Chomsky’s different texts.) Oenbring / 243 However, in his major popular-audience-focused text of the late sixties, 1968’s Language and Mind, Chomsky construes the post-Bloomfieldians as part of a broad effort in what he calls “behavioral science” to control behavior: Behavioral science has been much preoccupied with data and organization of data, and it has even seen itself as a kind of technology of control of behavior. Anti-mentalism in linguistics and in philosophy of language conforms to this shift of orientation. As I mentioned in my first lecture, I think that one major indirect contribution of modern structural linguistics results from its success in making explicit the assumptions of an anti-mentalistic, thoroughly operational and behaviorist approach to the phenomena of language. (58-59) The dubious parallel Chomsky is trying to draw is this: that by deemphasizing the innate, biological nature of language, post-Bloomfieldians were therefore exponents of radical behaviorism (i.e., infinite plasticity of learning through stimuli and responses) and thus are exponents of social engineering (i.e., Hockett = Skinner = McNamara). Indeed, it is important to remember that Language and Mind began as a series of lectures delivered on the campus of UC Berkeley when Chomsky was a visiting faculty there in 1967. Chomsky uses the occasion of addressing a general academic audience, and his appeal as a growing figure in the anti-Vietnam movement, to engage in such a direct attack. Such an explicit, and somewhat absurd, attack as we see here could not have succeeded (or likely even be publishable) in technical scholarship aimed at other linguists. Indeed, in his attacks on oppressive systems of power in his political writings, Chomsky routinely suggested that academics themselves have been co-opted by the Oenbring / 244 systems of power that it is their duty to critique. In his political writings of the late sixties Chomsky ramped up the level of his attack on ‘behavioral scientists’, and by extension the post-Bloomfieldians. Chomsky suggests, for example, in “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship,” an essay also published in 1968 that: In much the same way, behavioral scientists who believe themselves to be in possession of certain techniques of control and manipulation will tend to search for problems to which their knowledge and skills might be relevant, defining these as the “important problems”; and it will come as no surprise that they occasionally express their contempt for “flimsy premises involving world public opinion” that restrict the application of these skills. Thus among engineers, there are the “weapons cultists” who construct their bombs and among the behavioral scientists, we find the technicians who design and carry out “experiments with population resources control methods” in Vietnam. (25)248 As this quote clearly suggests, Chomsky connects the impulses behind what he calls behavioral science with attempts to pacify the rural population of Vietnam, surely a 248 In this passage Chomsky incorporates quotes from other sources in his own quirky way, a way that he does throughout his political writings. At the beginning of this passage he is continuing his use of a quote from US Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvannia, a relatively liberal midcentury senator. The quote comes originally from a congressional hearing, and Senator Clark is critiquing the comments of the director of Los Alamos Laboratories Weapons division. Chomsky does a decent job of framing the quote and introducing this important background information. However, at the end of this passage, Chomsky suddenly changes his source without proper introduction. Rather than quoting a liberal senator, he is at the end quoting the recent doctoral dissertation of William Nighswonger, one of these “behavorial scientists” whose dissertation, supported by the Pentagon, offered strategies for pacifying rural areas in Vietnam. Indeed, throughout his political writings we see Chomsky quoting other sources extensively, but oftentimes not properly introducing or paraphrasing these other sources; he lets the other voices that he introduces stand on their own. The attitude that Chomsky is demonstrating by introducing sources in this manner: information that is on the public record is accessible to anyone; anyone can and should be able to see through the lies. Oenbring / 245 highly emotive connection at that time. Writing for a broad audience, Chomsky can collapse all empirically-focused approaches to the study of man, whether funded by the Pentagon or not, into a single, vilified category: behavioral science.249 As this example shows, Chomsky has a tendency to be wily in the use of the prerogatives afforded rhetors in different domains of discourse to spread claims in others. Specifically, in this case he associates the post-Bloomfieldians with a dangerous political ideology, an ideology that many of the older generation of linguists were, no doubt, completely against. Nonetheless, Chomsky has used techniques like this throughout his career. 249 The above passage is particularly interesting as Chomsky has in more recent decades positioned himself as a defender of the enlightenment. Indeed, Chomsky issued several statements against cultural studies of science during the so-called ‘science wars’ of the 1990s. Speaking of feminist and cultural studies critiques of “white male science,” Chomsky suggests in a short 1995 essay “Rationality/Science” that: in fact, the entire idea of “white male science” reminds me, I'm afraid, of “Jewish physics.” Perhaps it is another inadequacy of mine, but when I read a scientific paper, I can't tell whether the author is white or is male. The same is true of discussion of work in class, the office, or somewhere else. I rather doubt that the non-white, non-male students, friends, and colleagues with whom I work would be much impressed with the doctrine that their thinking and understanding differ from “white male science” because of their “culture or gender and race.” I suspect that “surprise” would not be quite the proper word for their reaction All of this suggests that Chomsky has, over his career, strategically positioned himself by turns against and with the project of building scientific knowledge about human beings in support of the project of generative grammar; that he now defends science against cultural studies critiques and other incursions by what he frames as charlatan postmodernists is surprising seeing that he took such a bold posture of dissidence in regard to science earlier in his career. Oenbring / 246 Chomsky’s Technical Genre Pictorial Representation of Word Frequencies for Technical Corpus Figure 1 As I have noted, many of Chomsky’s most important publications in syntactic theory have been quite technical and rather inaccessible. Many of these highly technical texts are, interestingly, some of Chomsky’s most famous and most cited texts among generative grammarians (see, for example, my citation study of Linguistic Inquiry).250 Indeed, Chomsky’s technical texts have become, by and large, more inaccessible over time; as generative grammar’s place within the discipline of linguistics has become more 250 While certain texts are certainly more prototypical members of the genre than others, we can place the following publications, many of them seminal, into the category of the technical genre: Syntactic Structures (1957); Current Issues in Linguistics Theory/”Logical Basis” (1964); Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965); The Sound Pattern of English (1968); “Remarks on Nominalization” (1970); Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (1972); “Conditions on Transformations” (1973); “Conditions on Rules of Grammar” (1976); “Filters and Control” (1977) (with Lasnik); "On wh-movement" (1977); "On binding" (1980); Lectures on Government and Binding (1981); Barriers (1986); The Minimalist Program (1995) (including 1993 w/ Lasnik); "Minimalist Inquiries: The Framework" (2000); "Derivations by Phase" (2001); a 2005 article in Linguistic Inquiry “Three Factors in Language Design”; and, most recently, Chomsky’s unpublished 2006 manuscript “Approaching UG from Below.” Oenbring / 247 established, Chomsky has had to do less and less to make his claims clear to outsiders.251 In fact, one might say that at times Chomsky’s writing smacks more of the ponderous prose of a low-level engineer than a master rhetor.252 (Of course, this may be to some degree a deliberate rhetorical choice; Chomsky uses — and, indeed, inspires other generative grammarians to also use — an inaccessible and ‘dry’ style in order to promote the scientific ethos of generative accounts.) Scientific and technical writing is usually thought to be totally lacking in artifice; generally, scientific and technical prose is assumed to be little more than a container, not constraining knowledge in any way. While the issue of whether the findings of the hard sciences are constrained or affected in a substantive way by the language used in that inquiry is still under debate, what is not up for debate is whether it is in the best interest of softer or would-be sciences (like linguistics) to appropriate the prestige of harder sciences by putting on the trappings of those harder sciences, including their writing styles. This is a technique that generative grammarians, following Chomsky, have used with great success. Nevertheless, the fact that many of Chomsky’s most technical texts are also some of his most famous and most cited would, at first, seem to directly contradict a commonly made claim by rhetoricians of science: that we can account for a text’s success (or lack thereof) by examining its style and/or its packaging (see, for example, McCloskey’s The Rhetoric of Economics and/or Gross’ The Rhetoric of Science). That is to say, if 252 In fact, there are multiple websites using bots of varying quality that produce randomlygenerated text mimicking Chomsky’s technical prose. Oenbring / 248 Chomsky’s most successful texts are also some of his most inaccessible, then it would appear that what other scholars appreciated about the texts were the texts’ ideas and propositions — not the author’s style. Recognizing that some of Chomsky’s most influential texts have also been some of his most technical does not, however, require a retreat to the traditionalist position: that rhetoric has little to no effect on scholarly discourse. Indeed, this seeming problem disappears when we consider that the audience of these technical texts is not a general academic audience. That is to say, technical texts such as Lectures on Government and Binding and The Minimalist Program have become famous because they have formed the core of the intra-paradigm methodological revolutions that Chomsky has sponsored over the years — revolutions that succeed in part because they were articulated in language inaccessible to broader audiences. Rather, these books succeeded in large part because they have promoted technical discourses that have budded off into distinct intellectual communities. Whether these successful texts seem technical and unwelcoming to nonspecialists does not matter. (What I am describing here is somewhat analogous to Aristotle’s divide in On Rhetoric between konoi topoi [starting points for arguments in all domains of discourse (e.g., including legal and political settings)] and idia topoi [domain or discipline-specific argument starting points].) Chomsky’s use of technical formalisms has, since the fifties, played an important role in setting up boundaries for the communities of generative grammarians (see, for example, Chomsky’s earliest publications like “Logical Syntax and Semantics”). As I have noted, in the early days, by using logical syntax to study human language, Chomsky Oenbring / 249 was promoting methods both inaccessible to contemporary linguists (except through own his work) and also outside the concerns of logicians; by using a set of methods and technical discourse of one field on the research object of another field, Chomsky was creating his own unique discipline of inquiry. In a way, this is a trick that Chomsky has repeated numerous times. Indeed, over the history of generative grammar, Chomsky has rearticulated the guiding methods of the discipline, but has done so in texts largely inaccessible to the broader intellectual community — and increasingly inaccessible to generative grammarians themselves. Indeed, to move the identity of the field of generative grammar and lead the field through his serial revolutions of identity, what has been necessary for Chomsky has been to articulate a set of methods, methods that, although not truly novel, appear to be clearly distinct from governing practices. This leads groups to bud off from the dominant intellectual community, with those new groups developing institutional critical mass. The shifting sets of inaccessible (and somewhat incommensurable) technical discourses that Chomsky has sponsored have each played an important role in constituting these intellectual communities. It is this technical discourse, broadly defined, of generative grammarians, inspired by and sprouted from Chomsky’s work — and how this discourse serves to organize and isolate the community of generative grammarians — that is the object of the remainder of this section. No matter how inaccessible and formal Chomsky’s prose gets later in the work, almost all of Chomsky’s technical texts have alluring world creation appeals at a prominent place toward the beginning of the text; Chomsky uses his alluring terminology Oenbring / 250 to bring the reader into a world where knowledge must play by the rules he presents. For example, Chomsky’s 1980 article in Linguistic Inquiry “On Binding” begins: The earliest work in transformational generative grammar aimed to develop a concept of “grammatical transformation” rich enough to overcome, in a unified way, a variety of problems that arose in the attempt to develop a satisfactory theory of sentence structure and an associated account of meaning and use for natural language. While the goal, from the outset, was what has sometimes been called “explanatory adequacy”, the devices proposed were of so rich and varied a nature as to leave this goal fairly inaccessible. Since that time, research has advanced both in range and in depth. Many new phenomena have been studied, and there as been some progress, I believe, towards a more principled theory of grammar with far more restrictive devices and some abstract principles (1) Chomsky begins the piece by presenting a narrative overviewing the history of generative grammar, a narrative set up to quickly bring the reader to the important distinctive concerns of Chomsky’s then contemporary approach (recall that one of Chomsky’s biggest concerns of later EST was moving toward more abstract rules, and to deemphasize potential for falsification as a criterion). During the narrative, Chomsky draws upon his distinctive terminology / points of identity such as grammatical transformation, explanatory adequacy, and even the notion of principled explanation to Oenbring / 251 set up the rules of play for the coming text in a manner that serves his contemporary concerns.253 After these alluring and welcoming world creation appeals, Chomsky’s technical texts inevitably sponsor a set of technical machinery for describing human syntax. Chomsky does this by either tinkering with or renaming important elements of the technical apparatus used by generative grammarians. For example, well within Aspects, Chomsky introduces a system of rules, represented in part here: (i) S → NP^Predicate-Phrase (ii) Predicate-Phrase → Aux^VP (Place) (Time) … (v) Prep-Phrase → Direction, Duration, Place, Frequency, etc. (vi) V → CS (Aspects 107) In effect, what Chomsky is presenting is a toolkit for would-be generative linguists to manipulate. By using Chomsky’s toolkit in future research, other linguists necessarily make their work beholden to Chomsky. Indeed, by using technical apparatus sponsored by Chomsky, later generative grammarians have, in effect, made their work only accessible to a distinct intellectual community. What’s more, by sponsoring or renaming terminology in each publication, Chomsky creates the appearance of progress in the field.254 However, in comparison to the historical/philosophical texts Chomsky’s available repertoire of introductory narratives is somewhat limited in the technical texts. This is due to the fact that Chomsky’s audience is more familiar with the story of generative grammar; he is limited in the tales he can spin. 254 As I have noted, despite the fact that deep structure and surface structure have not been a part of the formal models of generative grammar for decades, an analogous divide between a level or representation relating to meaning and a level relating sound has played an important role in every subsequent program that Chomsky has sponsored. 253 Oenbring / 252 Although the toolkit from Aspects presented in part above may look inaccessible to those not familiar with Chomsky’s technical prose, the above language is not nearly as theory-internal and abstruse as some of Chomsky’s more recent technical works, particularly those under the Minimalist Program. The following passage from Chomsky’s 2000 article “Minimalist Inquiries: The Framework” is typical of his recent, highly technical prose: “Pure Merge is Merge that is not part of Move. The relevant properties of Tβ have to do with Case/agreement and the EPP. In (5bii), if EA does not raise, [Spec, Tβ] is introduced by pure Merge to satisfy the EPP. The case of H = nondefective T is omitted in (5b): if (5bi) holds for C, it holds for (nondefective) T selected by C” (103). These three sentences are dominated by theory internal operations and concepts (e.g., Merge, Move, Spec), intialisms (EPP, EA), and alphanumeric expressions representing formal expressions (5b, 5bii). Moreover, Chomsky peppers his technical prose with numerous Greek letters, a technique borrowed by other generative grammarians, no doubt in part to build the mathematical (read: scientific) appeal of generative grammar.255 Nonetheless, when confronted with such prose, as readers we usually have the impression that there is profound insight or truth being presented that we, unfortunately, are not able to understand. 255 The fact that generative grammar has its own technical vocabulary and apparatus largely inaccessible to non-specialists is not, in and of itself, despite the cries of many non-Chomskyan linguists, a point to criticize the generative grammar for; all academic fields develop their own specialized vocabulary, their own argot. Like in many academic fields, generative grammarians express a preference for explicit and formal definitions of terms even though those terms are used in a broader sense in other fields and in popular discourses. Oenbring / 253 Although there has always been an element of smoke and mirrors to Chomsky’s formalisms in his technical writing, it is clear that Chomsky’s more recent uses of formalism are more smoke and mirrors meant to build the scientific ethos than his formalisms had been in the past; while Chomsky’s use of formalism has always been part a genuine desire to express syntactic strings and claims about syntactic strings in a rigorous way and part smoke and mirrors, it is clear that the obfuscatory element has increased markedly in Chomsky’s recent work. (I develop this claim in the next chapter.) Furthermore, Chomsky has become more willing in recent work to use his authority to introduce technical elements to the model. For example, Chomsky introduces elements to the model several times in 2000’s “Minimalist Inquiries” using language similar to the following: “we assume, then, that a language L maps ([F], Lex) to Exp. The natural simplification would be to reduce access to the domain ([F], Lex) of L. … Keeping to narrow syntax, then, we may take CHL to be a mapping of Lex to the LF representations of Exp” (100, italics added). Note Chomsky’s particular phraseology here: we assume and we may take. While Chomsky uses we to occlude his own agency in introducing this variable to the model, this is clearly a power play. Similarly, Chomsky has a tendency to appropriate other competing notions and technical discourse; Chomsky has a history of authorizing other methods and by bringing those methods into the Theory, whether the original promoters of the original notions want their ideas assimilated into generative theory or not. Consider the following short passage from Chomsky’s 1981 technical text Lectures on Government and Binding: Oenbring / 254 To relate these notions to the θ-criterion, let us extend the notion “θ-marking” in the following way. We will say256 that α θ-marks the category β if α θ-marks the position occupied by β or a trace of β. Note that α subcategorizes a position but θmarks both a position and a category. (34) This short passage includes numerous theory-internal explicitly defined terms, including θ-criterion, θ-marking, trace, position, and category. Specifically in this passage, Chomsky is extending the formal definition of θ-marking. Although θ-roles, a.k.a. or thematic or semantic roles (basically the specific meaning-roles that noun phrases play in sentences), were developed by linguists such as Gruber, Halliday, and Chafe (the latter two distinctly anti-generative in orientation), Chomsky brought semantic roles into the fold under the Extended Standard theory and has given them a central place in the GB / P and P framework; while semantic roles developed largely outside the generative tradition, Chomsky appropriated and explicitly redefined them according to relationships among elements in hierarchic syntactic trees. Indeed, Chomsky appropriated θ-roles, a pet concept of anti-generative functionalist linguists, and made it part of the Theory without so much as a by your leave. More crucially, Chomsky’s appropriation of thematic roles served to assimilate Fillmore’s competing notion of case grammar within generative theory; Chomsky co-opted Fillmore’s competing methods by making them part of his own model. Another element of Chomsky’s technical writing that deserves discussion is Chomsky’s and his followers’ systematic in-group citation. In their technical works, 256 Note the phrasing: “We will say…” Oenbring / 255 Chomsky and his followers establish the legitimacy of their concerns by noting that similar ideas have been discussed in other studies. As I have noted, at the time of Current Issues, there were few generative grammarians operating outside of Cambridge. Nevertheless, Chomsky does much rhetorically in Current Issues to frame the generative approach as a much more established tradition of scholarship than it was at 1964. Chomsky, for example, suggests in footnote that: The most accessible summary of formal properties of grammatical transformations, from this point of view, is in Chomsky (1961a). For further details, see Chomsky (1955, chapters 8, 9). The most extensive study of English grammar within this framework is Lees (1960a). See the bibliography of the second printing of (1962) of Chomsky (1957a) for references to much recent work. In addition, cf. Schacter (1961, 1962), Postal (1962), Langendoen (1963b). (Current Issues 13) In this short footnote, Chomsky cites articles by one then current graduate student at MIT (Lagendoen), one former graduate student (Lees), one colleague at MIT (Postal), and himself a total of three times (including an unpublished manuscript257). While this footnote nicely captures the knowledge building dynamics of a developing field, it also is of course a slight of hand. The goal of this sleight of hand: to make the largely arbitrary methodological preferences he and his followers have included in their lines of inquiry to Indeed, the bibliography of Current Issues includes a total of three of Chomsky’s unpublished works. 257 Oenbring / 256 appear as more than just arbitrary micro-methodological preferences, but to construe them as the findings of an established tradition of inquiry.258 Chomksy’s Historical/Philosophical Genre Pictorial Representation of Word Frequencies for Historical/Philosophical Corpus Indeed, as Randy Harris notes in his analysis of Syntactic Structures, Chomsky’s work often relies upon a maze of self-reference. Harris eloquently observes that: Of the 74 specific citations in [Syntactic Structures], 31 are to Chomsky’s own work; 12 are to Logical Structure, with another 5 to “Transformational Analysis,” the Logical Structures [sic] chapter that comprised his doctoral thesis. Much of this systematic selfcitation clearly has to do with the fact that he was carving out paths in an area which had seen very few explorers before him. And he is clearly making the best with what little inartistic authority he has to draw upon. But there is a certain lack of subtlety here. In a monograph barely over a hundred pages, there is something excessive about reminding the audience so recurrently that more rigorous treatments can be found elsewhere – particularly when there are only seven items to distribute among the 31 citations, and when the two most frequently cited documents (one of which contains the other) are both unpublished. (“Argumentation” 121) Harris is correct to note both Chomsky’s rhetorical achievement of “making the best with what little inartistic authority he has to draw upon” (121), and Chomsky’s obvious sleight of hand in his “reminding the audience so recurrently that more rigorous treatments can be found elsewhere.” Nevertheless, reoccurring self-citation and systems of in-group citation have played an important role in the development of generative grammar. 258 Oenbring / 257 Figure 2 Never content merely to be a successful linguist, Chomsky began expanding the bounds of his empire beyond linguistics early on in his career. Indeed, due to publications such as his review of Skinner and due to his reception by collaborators such as Miller and Lenneberg, Chomsky was, by the mid-sixties, building a reputation in the field of cognitive psychology.259 With his 1966 book Cartesian Linguists, Chomsky began another tack for spreading his claims outside of linguistics proper: positioning the project of generative in relation to the claims of the founding fathers of classical modern philosophy and science (e.g.., Descartes, Hume, and Galileo) in order to present generative grammar to a broader academic audience. Chomsky’s goal in positioning his project against these classic philosophers and scientists in texts like Cartesian Linguistics is, at least in historical perspective, clear: to use these well-known philosophers and scientists as points of reference against which to build the identity of his own project (i.e., by claiming the throne of Descartes, as he does in the title of the book, he was claiming the tradition of rationalism, a tradition that had long been recognized as distinct from empiricism,260 a guiding idea of the post-Bloomfieldian linguists). These appeals to famous philosophers have worked in part due the fact that the language of philosophy serves, in a very real way, as a lingua franca of the academy. Indeed, it is clear that by invoking these philosophers, Chomsky was opening the door for his broader reception in other fields; he was attempting to popularize his ideas. See for example the prominent place given to Chomsky’s work in Lenneberg’s edited volume Biological Foundations of Language. 260 This is not, however, to suggest that the post-Bloomfieldians took Locke, Hume, and Berkeley as patron philosophers. 259 Oenbring / 258 At first glance though, Cartesian Linguistics, like several of Chomsky’s texts in what I refer to as his historical/philosophical genre, may not appear much like popularization — or even particularly welcoming. Also, the book may appear at first less an attempt to tell the story of generative grammar to an audience of non-linguists than a straightforward attempt to tell a piece of intellectual history; there is very little direct I am explaining to you why my version of linguistics is relevant in Cartesian Linguistics. Nonetheless, Chomsky reduplicated the governing appeals of Cartesian Linguistics in his successful 1968 book Language and Mind, a book more clearly designed as popularization (a book since 2006 in its third edition). Despite the fact that these texts are rarely cited by generative grammarians, Cartesian Linguistics and Language and Mind are, for certain two of Chomsky’s highest profile texts among non-linguists.261 While Chomsky’s historiography in Cartesian Linguistics and Language and Mind has always been suspect to a large number of scholars, if increasing the profile of the author is a proper measure of success for academic publications, both books have been triumphs. Following in suit, Chomsky has, over the years, repeated the governing stylistic modes of these two books in numerous publications, including: Problems of Knowledge and Freedom (1971), a volume devoted partially to his political work; Reflections on Language (1975), a more technical intervention in philosophical discussion; Rules and Representations (1980); Knowledge of Language (1986), a book 261 Indeed, a search of the Science Citation Index suggests, for example, that after Aspects and SPE, Cartesian Linguistics and Language and Mind were Chomsky’s most-cited texts of the 1960s, each leading to a handful of translations, with the former producing forty documented reviews and the latter (along with its second edition) leading to at least fourteen reviews (see, Koerner and Tajima). Oenbring / 259 partially written in the historical/philosophical register and partially in the technical register262; Language and Problems of Knowledge (1988); Language and Thought (1993); The Architecture of Language (2000); New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind (2000); and, most recently, On Nature and Language (2002). The audiences of these historical/philosophical texts have over the years remained mostly non-linguists. Indeed, a search of the Science Citation Index for Chomsky’s 2000 volume New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, suggests that less than 1/6th of the total number of citations of the text have taken place in traditional linguistics journals, with the large majority occurring in journals with a focus on philosophy. 263 In the remainder of this section, I attempt to trace the important rhetorical and expository features of Chomsky’s historical/philosophical texts. This analysis leads into 262 Indeed, as my citation count in Linguistic Inquiry demonstrates, Knowledge of Language is Chomsky’s only historical/philosophical text that has developed an extensive citation history in the technical scholarship. This is due, no doubt, to Chomsky’s important suggestions for the GB/ P and P model made in the latter half of the book, and due to the fact that it is the first volume where Chomsky expresses his (in)famous ideas regarding evolution. 263 Following a tradition originated with Language and Mind, many of Chomsky’s historical/philosophical texts began their lives as public lectures. Interestingly enough, however, the historical/philosophical expository content of Chomsky’s most recent books based on public lectures has, however, dropped off. Indeed, Language and Thought (1993) includes minimal historical/philosophical exposition, and The Architecture of Language (2000) contains even less. The reasons for this decline in historical/philosophical content are simple if one considers that coming up with new historical/philosophical arguments must be laborious task; as Chomsky’s fame — and demand for his books — have increased, suddenly his work needs to meet lower and lower standards of quality to be publishable. That is to say, Chomsky no longer necessarily needs to come up with a polished set of new historical/philosophical arguments to publish books. How else can one human write over 100 books in a lifetime? (Indeed, as Chomsky’s international fame has increased, publishers have become more willing to put out less polished versions of Chomsky’s public lectures. The blame can also be put on Chomsky as well: as demand for Chomsky’s work has increased, he has been willing to let increasingly less polished material go to print. This waning of quality as Chomsky’s fame has spread is especially prominent in Chomsky’s most recent political volumes, which often are little more than the transcripts of informal interviews with interlocutors or the largely unedited transcripts of public lectures.) Oenbring / 260 an extensive discussion of how Chomsky has changed the claims of historical/philosophical texts over the decades. As I note, although the figures against which Chomsky has positioned generative grammar have changed over the years, the basic tactic has remained the same (with the strategic nature of these appeals becoming clearer over time). That is to say, the historical/philosophical expository techniques of Cartesian Linguistics and Language and Mind continue to the present. Indeed, Chomsky begins one of his public lectures reprinted in 2002’s On Nature and Language by invoking the authority of Galileo as historical precursor for the notion of the creative aspect of language use. Specifically, Chomsky states that: It would only be appropriate to begin with some of the thoughts of the master, who does not disappoint us, even though the topics I want to discuss are remote from his primary concerns. Galileo may have been the first to recognize clearly the significance of the core property of human language, and one of its most distinctive properties: the use of finite means to express an unlimited array of thoughts. (On Nature and Language 45) As this quote suggests, Chomsky aligns his project with an observation (apparently) made by Galileo, one of the founding fathers of modern science. The ultimate effect of such appeals: to make his work appear to be in dialogue with – and ultimately part of the canon of the masters. While an important feature of Chomsky’s technical texts are attempts to build the appearance of progression in the model (something largely achieved by Chomsky’s updates of terminology), the historical/philosophical texts consistently look backward to Oenbring / 261 such classic philosophers and scientists. The reason for this divide seems clear: appeals to the authority of tradition (i.e., appeals to the classics) bear more weight with nonspecialist audiences than with specialist audiences. To use Aristotle’s terms, appeals to the classics are konoi, not idia, topoi to Chomsky. 264 Unlike in his technical publications, Chomsky cannot assume the readers of the historical/philosophical texts to have an extensive knowledge of the disciplinary history of the field. Accordingly, when explaining the methods of generative grammar in the historical/philosophical texts, Chomsky — even in his more recent texts — starts at the beginning. What’s more, as he is given the prerogative to — in a very real way — create the field of linguistics in each text for his audience of non-linguists, Chomsky takes liberties with the ways that he tells the story of generative grammar. Indeed, in historical perspective, the stories that he tells have changed remarkably over time, with new stories reenergizing the claims of generative grammar. The effect of these shifts has been to reinvigorate the claims and to build the revolutionary ethos of the field. Enforcing his authority as a ‘revolutionary’ linguist, the historical/philosophical texts are laden with visionary language. Chomsky, for example, claims early in his lecture reproduced in 1993’s Language and Thought that: Traditional questions are no longer forgotten or dismissed as absurd and senseless, as they were during the heyday of “behavioral science” and the various brands of structuralism. They have been reopened and in some cases seriously 264 Although less prominent in his technical works than his historical/philosophical works, such appeals to classic figures have, nevertheless, played important roles in Chomsky’s texts aimed at the community of linguists – particularly in the world creation sections of the books. This is especially the case in important mid-sixties works like Current Issues and Aspects. Oenbring / 262 investigated. New questions are being posed that could not have been imagined a few years ago, and they seem to be the right ones, opening the way to new understanding, and unsuspected problems. (16) Reiterating here his rhetorically-created category of “behavioral science” (notice Chomsky’s own scare quotes), Chomsky paints in broad strokes regarding broad shifts in the orientation and goal of linguistic theory for an audience of non-linguists. In the historical/philosophical texts, Chomsky makes sure to keep things grand and, usually, vague. Accordingly, the reader of the historical/philosophical texts gets the sense that Chomsky is reporting back from the field, rather than rhetorically reinforcing and recreating the commitments of the field for an audience of non-linguists. (After all, he’s the famous linguist.) Early on in Language and Problems of Knowledge, for example, Chomsky reminds the reader that what “I will not try to give an exposition of the current state of understanding of language; that would be far too large a task to undertake in the time available” (1). Furthermore, Chomsky has taken to using examples from the local language in order to explain the model he is presenting to the audience. Language and Problems, a book based on series of lectures given in Nicaragua in 1986, for example, gives numerous examples in Spanish. The ultimate effect for the public audience/reader of the text is to give the feeling that Chomsky has all the facts under control and is merely giving an example to the public in their local language out of his benevolence. Although the rhetorical maneuvers in the historical/philosophical texts are clear, Chomsky claims these texts be largely straightforward popularizations (i.e., simplifying Oenbring / 263 the message in order to explain the field to non-specialists). Indeed, while explaining the methods of generative grammarians to an audience of non-specialists is, for certain, one of the primary goals of these historical/philosophical texts, Chomsky’s works in this genre actually offer very little in the way of direct explanation of specific trends and findings in current generative scholarship. Instead, the goal of these texts appears to be undergirding the foundations of generative grammar, renewing the impetus behind the field for a general academic audience. As in many linguistics textbooks (books which themselves are mostly like taking their cues from Chomsky), one of the important goals of the historical/philosophical texts is to surround the reader with Chomsky’s definitive terminology (what I have called in this study his points of identity). Knowledge of Language, for example, introduces the reader to all of the following distinctly Chomskyan notions: universal grammar, language faculty, Plato’s problem, Orwell’s problem, I-language, E-language (the last four being terms Chomsky introduces with the text). The ultimate effect of the initiate to linguistics being surrounded in these Chomskyan god-terms is to make their knowledge of the field beholden to Chomsky’s person. However, unlike linguistics textbook, Chomsky does not tie the terminology he presents to his own person — to do so would be to violate the (apparent) scientific values of modesty and objectivity. Oenbring / 264 Arguing the Perfectly-Formed Mind: Chomsky’s Monism and Dualism as Foundational Rhetorics As I have suggested in this study, one of the primary reasons for the success of Chomksy’s reinvention of generative grammar in each of its various forms has been his ability to articulate a new revolutionary identity for the program of generative grammar along with his unveiling of a new set of methodological commitments and assumptions for the field. That is to say, Chomsky has actively worked to construct a series of conceptual revolutions coinciding with his unveiling of a new orientation for generative theorizing. The various changes in the model of generative grammar that Chomsky has promoted over the years have been more changes in the rhetorical framework used to legitimate the program to the linguistic and broader academic community than substantive changes in core methodological commitments. Among the differing rhetorical frameworks that Chomsky has used in order to legitimate the program of generative grammar as scientific, one of the most interesting points of tension is the dynamic between his monist and dualist rhetorics. As I have suggested, much of the work of framing the various programs of generative grammar as each uniquely revolutionary and scientific has been done by the texts of what I have called Chomksy’s historical/philosophical genre — texts where he positions the project of generative grammar against the methods of several of the most important scientists and philosophers in history. The philosophers and scientists that Chomsky positions himself in relation to in these texts have espoused various dualist (the proposition that there exists Oenbring / 265 a mind/spirit distinct from the material body and/or perfect conceptual structures in mind) and monist (espousing only a material body) (meta)physical systems. For example, in his popularly-focused arguments in support of the Aspects model,265 the time of the ascent of generative grammar, Chomsky more or less directly connected his view of the mind to Descartes, a philosopher/scientist whose view of the mind is, for certain, deeply entwined with his religious orientation and physiological dualism. While Chomsky has never explicitly promoted dualism, the belief that there exists a mind/spirit that is distinct from the purely material body, the methodology of generative grammar as a whole is deeply entwined with the notion that there exist innate, seemingly transcendent, formal structures in the brain — structures that cannot, at least with our current limited understanding of the physiology of the mind, be decomposed into component parts. Chomsky, for example, argues in his 1986 university public lecture text Language and Problems of Knowledge that “the discoveries of the linguist-psychologist set the state for further inquiry into brain mechanisms, inquiry that must proceed blindly, without knowing what it is looking for, in the absence of such understanding, expressed at an abstract level” (7). Indeed, generative grammar, like many would-be cognitive sciences, posits the existence of formal structures in the mind that we have no direct physiological evidence for. As such, the formal structures promoted by the work of generative grammarians are reminiscent of the perfect ideas in the mind promoted in the work of Descartes (see, for example, Meditations on First Philosophy and Discourse on Method). 265 See, for example, Chomsky’s 1971 debate with Foucault (The Chomsky-Foucault Debate). Oenbring / 266 What’s more, to any biologist or psychologist working with real physiological evidence generative grammar may seem, due to its very methods, vaguely dualist and mystical. 266 Nevertheless, Chomsky’s work in the sixties and seventies to connect his own view of the mind with that of Descartes, one of the founding fathers of modern science and modern philosophy, was in part a rhetorical maneuver — a rhetorical maneuver designed to craft for generative grammar a conceptual coherence distinct from the governing empiricist, behaviorist, and relativist approaches. It is, indeed, a remarkable fact that Chomsky was able to further his project of demarcating267 generative grammar as a more scientific approach to the study of human language than the post-Bloomfieldian approach by connecting his view of the mind with a dualist philosopher. Descartes is not, however, the only philosopher with a metaphysical system at odds with contemporary scientific materialism that Chomsky has, over the history of generative grammar, allied his ideas with. In support of GB / P and P, Chomsky connected the project of generative grammar with the ideas of another foundational idealist philosopher, packaging the problem of language acquisition as (what he has referred to elsewhere as the poverty of the stimulus) as “Plato’s problem.” While Chomsky connected his view of the mind with dualist and rationalist philosophers throughout much of the history of generative grammar, he has, however, in the last decade substantively changed the tack of his historical/philosophical 266 This claim has been echoed by linguists in schools competing with generative grammar, including the post-Bloomfieldians. Hall, for example, has charged generative grammar with being “medieval ignorance” (Hall 129). 267 I have borrowed the notion of ‘rhetorical demarcation’ from Charles Alan Taylor’s Defining Science. Oenbring / 267 argumentation; Chomsky has gone from explicitly connecting his ideas with dualist philosophers to actively arguing against the dualist view of the mind-body problem. Indeed, under the Minimalist Program (MP), Chomsky’s historical/philosophical argumentation has instead attempted to connect generative grammar with the simplicity and elegance of physical systems; under MP, Chomsky’s revolutionary vision for generative grammar has taken on a decidedly monist flavor (see, for example, Chomsky’s 2000 historical/philosophical text New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind and his 2002 university public lecture text On Nature and Language). That is to say, Chomsky has been able to promote a revolutionary vision for the Minimalist Program by rhetorically exorcising the ghost in the machine that he himself had seemingly argued for throughout most of his career. (He, of course, never includes himself among the nowvilified dualists.)268 Indeed, the revolutionary vision of the Minimalist Program (which I will analyze more substantively in the next chapter) has quite a different focus from the revolutionary rhetorics of earlier programs. Rather than working to build the disciplinary legitimacy and coherence of generative grammar by suggesting that the approach lays bare structures 268 The historical narrative I present here, however, makes the break seem much clearer than it actually has been. What I describe in this section of this chapter is Chomsky’s overarching tendencies over time in regard to the philosophers he has associated generative grammar with. For example, Chomsky’s more recent naturalistic (a.k.a. monistic) appeals can be found in much earlier publications (e.g., 1980’s Rules and Representations and 1981’s “A Naturalistic Approach to Language and Cognition”). Furthermore, Chomsky’s analyses and appeals to Descartes’ work continue into the eighties (e.g., 1984’s Modular Approaches to the Study of the Mind) and nineties (e.g., 1991’s “Language, Politics, and Composition”). Keep in mind, however, that one of the main functions of the historical/philosophical texts is to build the revolutionary appeal of Chomsky’s works; it does not seem to matter whether or not Chomsky’s claims at any one point in time actually are new. This is made even truer by the fact that Chomsky’s audiences for the historical/philosophical texts remain relatively ignorant of generative grammar and linguistics; Chomsky can in a real sense create the field of linguistics when he speaks to non-linguists. Oenbring / 268 of a largely mysterious mind as was the focus from the Aspects program until Principles and Parameters, the rhetoric of the Minimalist Program has increasingly connected generative grammar with the physical sciences, frequently using analogies from chemistry and physics; the rhetoric of MP seemingly suggests that the mind transcends the messiness of biological systems. Indeed, much of Chomsky’s philosophical/historical argumentation under MP has worked to emphasize that the human mind is ultimately a machine controlled by chemical and physiological processes.269 In the remainder of the main body of this chapter, I shall specifically analyze how Chomsky has, throughout his career, rhetorically used monist and dualist notions in order to both promote a distinct disciplinary identity for generative grammar and build the scientific prestige of generative grammar across the academy. As I have noted, this section will primarily be an analysis of Chomsky’s external rhetoric: the argumentative 269 The situation is made even more complicated by the fact that Chomsky has, under MP, become much more willing to make explicitly anti-foundational argumentative moves; while Chomsky now argues explicitly that all is matter, he now is also not afraid to suggest in print that all descriptions of nature are necessarily theory-laden. That is to say, Chomsky is willing to make a classically monist statement like the following: It is important to recognize that Cartesian dualism was a reasonable scientific thesis, but one that disappeared three centuries ago. There has been no mind-body problem to debate since. (On Nature and Language 70) But will follow his seemingly monist statement by suggesting something surprisingly antifoundational: This thesis did not disappear because of inadequacies of the Cartesian concept mind, but because Newton’s demolition of the mechanical philosophy. It is common to ridicule “Descartes’ error” in postulating mind, his “ghost in the machine.” But that mistakes what happened: Newton exorcised the machine; the ghost remained intact. (On Nature and Language 70-71) This argumentative maneuver, which I will analyze specifically later in this chapter is, ultimately, a move by Chomsky to soften his realist position; Chomsky has become under MP much more willing to acknowledge that generative grammar may not be unequivocally laying bare the structures of the mind. Oenbring / 269 strategies that he has used in order to build the disciplinary prestige of generative grammar for a general academic audience.270 In regard to Chomsky’s external argumentation I argue specifically that Chomsky has, throughout his career, worked rhetorically in order to position generative grammar within foundational monist/materialist and dualist/idealist perspectives — even when his overall external rhetoric has seemingly lacked systematic coherence.271 As argumentative frameworks, monist and dualist perspectives both have had much to offer generative grammarians rhetorically: they both seemingly transcend the complexities of biological systems. By his promotion of monist and dualist perspectives, Chomsky has been able factor out the messiness of biological systems and to frame the mind as an object amenable to description using formal logical operations like those used by generative grammar. That is to say, Chomsky has described the mind using monist and dualist/idealist rhetorics in order to both make a space for generative approaches and to build the scientific prestige of generative descriptions of human languages. The Rhetoric of Dualism I should say that I approach classical rationalism not really as a historian of science or a historian of philosophy … but rather from the point of view of, let's say, an art lover, 270 While there have been, for certain, some interesting points of intersection between the rhetorics that Chomsky has used to promote his various programs for generative grammar among both specialists in generative syntax and for a general academic audience, it is important to distinguish between Chomsky’s external and internal rhetorics. 271 Interestingly, Chomsky’s external rhetoric under Principles and Parameters, the system of generative grammar preceding MP, can be seen as a fusion of the rhetorical dualism of the Aspects program with the rhetorical monism of MP. Oenbring / 270 who wants to look at the seventeenth century to find in it things that are of particular value, and that obtain part of their value in part because of the perspective with which he approaches them. Chomsky, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate Around the time of his seminal mentalist work Aspects, Chomsky published historical/philosophical works exploring the history of rationalist philosophy (a tradition of thought of which Descartes was one of the prime sources), positioning himself as a follower of a long and venerable tradition of thought (see, for example, Cartesian Linguistics and Language and Mind).272 Chomsky’s move of positioning himself as heir to the throne of Descartes was, I argue, an unmistakably rhetorical maneuver — a maneuver which worked to crystallize a clear and distinct disciplinary identity for generative linguistics. While several scholars have argued that Chomsky’s and Descartes’ systems are largely incommensurable,273 I acknowledge that Chomsky’s connection of his view of the mind with Descartes is not totally unfounded. Both Descartes and Chomsky, for example, argue that there are distinct well-formed notions that exist in the mind a priori that any rational human being can easily access by reflection. This foundational 272 Similar historical/philosophical argumentation can, however, be found in even earlier works, including 1964’s Current Issues in Linguistic Theory and Aspects itself. 273 There have, of course, been numerous studies over the years that have commented on whether or not the similarities between Descartes’ and Chomsky’s projects are indeed substantive. Some scholars have been more willing to accept the similarities (see, for example, Hildebrant’s Cartesianische Linguistik and Fodor’s Modularity of Mind) than others (see, for example, Aarsleff’s review of Cartesian Linguistics and Bouveresse’s “Cartesian Linguistics: Grandeur and Decadence of a Myth”). Oenbring / 271 assumption clearly undergirds the methodology of generative grammar; following Chomsky’s lead, generative grammarians argue for the existence of innate cognitive structures based on evidence as meager as the perceived grammaticality of a small set of sentences vs. a different group of sentences — neither of which needs to be attested by a corpus. That is to say, Chomsky is able to construe small distinctions in individual languages as much more than banal cultural differences; he is able to construe these distinctions as evidence for innate structures in the human mind. Conversely, Descartes does not envision our ability to make clear and distinct distinctions as something that demonstrates the architecture of the mind. While Descartes does indeed believe that our ability to make clear distinctions is innate, he does not, however, suggest that this ability is a product of our biology; Descartes does not believe that our ability to make clear distinctions is something produced by the physiology of the mind (matter and mind being two separate things in Descartes’ system). Rather, Descartes believes that our ability to make clear distinctions is an ability that exists because of presence of God. Consider the following lush passage from Descartes’ Meditations: firstly, because I know that all which I clearly and distinctly conceive can be produced by God exactly as I conceive it, it is sufficient that I am able clearly and distinctly to conceive one thing apart from another, in order to be certain that the one is different from the other, seeing they may at least be made to exist separately, by the omnipotence of God; and it matters not by what power this separation is made, in order to be compelled to judge them different; and, Oenbring / 272 therefore, merely because I know with certitude that I exist, and because, in the meantime, I don’t observe that aught necessarily belongs to my nature or essence beyond my being a thinking thing, I rightly conclude that my essence consists only in my being a thinking thing, [or a substance whose essence or nature is merely thinking]. (91) As this quote suggests, Descartes clearly connects our ability to make clear distinctions between objects (what would be our intuitions regarding the grammaticality of sentences in Chomsky’s system) with the action of an omnipotent God. Whenever Chomsky connects his view of the mind with the work of Descartes, Chomsky’s reading, like many of his readings of philosophers, is highly focused; Chomsky’s reading of Descartes is strategic. Indeed, Chomsky primarily drew upon Descartes in the sixties and seventies in order to promote the notion that the human ability to craft unique utterances (that is, our ability to use language creatively) is totally unique in the natural world. However, evolutionary biologists have in the past few decades engaged in a heated debate regarding whether the human ability to produce and use language is all that unique, and some scholars (e.g., Pinker) have been more willing to trumpet Chomsky’s notion that the human faculty of language is totally unique than others (e.g., Lieberman).274 Nevertheless, Chomsky’s persistent rhetorical deployment of Descartes’ name in order to support his claims that human syntax is a distinct and autonomous cognitive faculty totally unique in the natural world seemingly suggests that See, for example, Lieberman’s Eve Spoke and Toward an Evolutionary Biology of Language and Pinker’s The Language Instinct. 274 Oenbring / 273 he understands the human faculty of language as something that exists on a different ontological plane from mere biology. We see Chomsky engaging in this strategic reading of Descartes in his two famous philosophical/historical texts of Aspects period: 1966’s Cartesian Linguistics, and1968’s Language and Mind. As Chomsky notes early on in Cartesian Linguistics (3), Descartes has little to say directly on the subject of language other than his famous assertion that humans’ ability to develop unique utterances distinguishes them from animals. Chomsky quotes Descartes’ Discourse on Method: it is a very remarkable fact that there are none so depraved and stupid, without even accepting idiots that they cannot arrange different words together, forming of them a statement by which they make known their thoughts; while, on the other hand, there is no other animal, however perfect and fortunately circumstanced it may be, which can do the same. (qtd. in Chomsky, 1966: 4) Chomsky, however, while acknowledging that Descartes has little to say on the subject of language other than this comment, still places this notion, a concept he calls the creative aspect of language use at the very center of his reading of Descartes; Chomsky latches onto this notion, operationally defining Cartesian philosophy as the creative aspect of language use (6).275 275 Indeed, in his famous 1971 debate with Foucault, the French philosopher challenges Chomsky’s reading, arguing that: when you speak of creativity as conceived by Descartes, I wonder if you don’t transpose to Descartes an idea with is to be found among his successors or even certain of his contemporaries. According to Descartes, the mind was not so very creative. It saw, it perceived, it was illuminated by the evidence. (The Chomsky-Foucault Debate 13) Oenbring / 274 Indeed, Chomsky devotes much of Cartesian Linguistics and Language and Mind to developing a conceptual genealogy of the history of the notion of the creative aspect of language use. That is to say, Chomsky devotes a substantial portion of these books to following the threads of the creative aspect of language use through later rationalist and romantic philosophers who have more to say directly on the subject of language (e.g., Cordemoy, Huarte, Schlegel, and Von Humboldt). While Chomsky never explicitly argues in Cartesian Linguistics and Language and Mind that the philosophers he presents are direct precursors to his own ideas, he frequently suggests the existence of direct parallels between the works of the philosophers he analyzes and “contemporary research” (72).276 Numerous commentators have suggested that Chomsky makes inappropriate connections between his own work and the ideas of Descartes and the other philosophers that he analyzes in Cartesian Linguistics and Language and Mind. Aarsleff's scathing (1970) review of Cartesian Linguistics, for example, argues all of the following: that Chomsky lacks “a reasonably comprehensive knowledge of the texts that are used and of the total work of each major figure” (571); that Chomsky relies on “inferior sources” (571); and that the book is deficient in “overall coherence”(572). Aarsleff's major concern seems to be that Chomsky traces, incorrectly, the strands of rationalist thought “straight through the German Romantics down to Wilhelm von Humboldt” (572). 276 Chomsky, for example, suggests that a protean form of the distinction between deep structure and surface structure (terms that he coyly refers to as “recent terminology” [33]) can be found in the work of the Port-Royal grammarians. Oenbring / 275 Chomsky's ability to construe his methods as both part of a long tradition, recently and unfairly discarded, and, furthermore, as newer, fresher, and more revolutionary than the empiricist program, no doubt helped him in his task of demarcating the generative approach as the only properly scientific approach to study human languages. At bare minimum, Chomsky's presentation of his ideas as descendants of Descartes and other rationalist philosophers in Cartesian Linguistics worked to rhetorically construct the existence of a pendulum swing back to rationalism, a notion clearly intimated in the book's subtitle: “A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought.” We can see similar rhetorical work in how Chomsky frames Descartes’ theory of transcendental ideas. As I have suggested, while Chomsky’s a priori ideas in the mind are formal operations that stand for biological structures that generative grammarians hope will eventually be discovered, Descartes’ transcendental ideas are, in fact, transcendental (i.e., they are not part of the physiology of the mind). As Hildebrandt notes in his Cartesianische Linguistik, Chomsky never claims that humans to have a metaphysical “connection with a higher intelligence” (40, my translation). Rather, Chomsky believes that the physiological makeup of the human brain makes it qualitatively dislike that of animals. While Descartes focuses in the Meditations (the work where he most clearly explicates his theory of innate transcendental ideas) on the divine origin of our ability to make clear distinctions, Chomsky presents in Cartesian Linguistics only those passages Oenbring / 276 from Descartes' discussion of transcendental ideas that seem more in debt to the Platonic tradition than Christian theology. Chomsky quotes Descartes’ “Reply to Objections V”: Hence when first in infancy we see a triangular figure depicted on paper, this figure cannot show us how a real triangle out to be conceived, in the way in geometricians consider it, because the true triangle is contained in this figure, just as the rough statue of Mercury is contained in a rough block of wood. But because we already possess within us the idea of a true triangle, and it can be more easily conceived by our mind than the more complex figure of the triangle drawn on paper, we, therefore, when we see that composite figure, apprehend not it itself, but rather the authentic triangle. (qtd. in Cartesian Linguistics 69) Chomsky’s decision to present the above passage from Descartes’ discussion of transcendental ideas is interesting for several reasons. First of all, the example suggests that there exist idealized geometric forms within the mind, and therefore seems more in debt to the Platonic tradition than the Christian tradition. By representing the mind as containing abstract geometric forms, Chomsky furthers his project of framing the human faculty of language as an object amenable to formal description using logical operations. Moreover, by presenting passages from Descartes’ discussion of transcendental ideas that seems more a product of Platonic thinking than Christian theology, Chomsky can trace the lineage of his ideas into the distant past while circumventing the religious baggage inherent in Descartes' philosophical system. By extricating the religious baggage of Descartes' thinking, Chomsky is able to lay claim to the prestige of Descartes' ideas and Oenbring / 277 name without explicitly promoting his psychological dualism — a metaphysical system that would have precluded the Chomsky's work from being accepted as a science. The External Rhetoric of GB / P and P While Chomsky connected his view of the mind to Descartes in the sixties and seventies, in the eighties in his historical/philosophical argumentation in support of GB / P and P, Chomsky switched his idealist philosopher of choice to a foundational philosopher whose doctrine of innate ideas appears at first to be much more secular; in support of Principles and Parameters (see, for example, Language and Problems of Knowledge and Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use), Chomsky framed the problem of language acquisition (what he elsewhere calls the poverty of the stimulus), as Plato’s problem. Chomsky formulates Plato’s problem based on a particular moment in Plato’s Meno: Socrates demonstrates that an untutored slave boy knows the principles of geometry by leading him, through a series of questions, to the discovery of theorems of geometry. This experiment raises a problem that is still with us: How was the slave boy able to find truths of geometry without instruction or information? (Language and Problems of Knowledge 4) As I have suggested, the Platonic tradition, in particular by its suggestion that there exist idealized geometric forms in the mind, has been rhetorically useful to Chomsky. Platonic transcendental ideas, unlike Cartesian ones, frame the mind as an object amenable to formal logical description seemingly without dualist baggage. Plato’s problem, however, Oenbring / 278 comes with its own attendant dualism and mysticism. As Chomsky acknowledges, Plato’s answer to the problem of how the child understood the geometric principles was to suggest that the knowledge had been placed in the boy’s mind in an earlier existence, only to have that knowledge reawakened by Socrates (Language and Problems of Knowledge 4). While the notion of Plato’s problem was certainly the most prominent feature of Chomsky’s historical/philosophical argumentation under GB/ P and P, Chomsky at this time also began introducing analogies from the physical sciences in order to frame generative descriptions of language and mind. Indeed, under GB/P and P, Chomksy began comparing the mind explicitly to chemical and physical systems, stating for example in Language and Problems of Knowledge that: When we speak of the mind, we are speaking at some level of abstraction of yet unknown physical mechanisms of the brain, much as those who spoke on the valence of oxygen or the benzene ring were speaking at some level of abstraction about physical mechanisms, then unknown. Just as the discoveries of the chemist set the stage for further inquiry into underlying mechanisms, so today the discoveries of the linguist-psychologist set the stage for further inquiry into brain mechanisms, inquiry that must proceed blindly without knowing what it is looking for, in the absence of such understanding, expressed at an abstract level. (7) As is clear in this passage, Chomsky rationalizes the abstract nature of generative descriptions of language by comparing generative grammarians’ task with physical Oenbring / 279 scientists speaking at a high degree of abstraction so that they may follow a line of inquiry. Of course, the two examples that Chomsky presents (the valence of oxygen and the benzene ring) were lines of inquiry that eventually proved fruitful. This passage is, furthermore, an example of what I have called monist argumentation. By ‘monist’ I mean not just that Chomsky argues for a purely material physical system; rather, I mean that Chomsky attempts to frame the mind as something that behaves with the mathematical preciseness of a very simple physical or chemical system. In this passage, for example, Chomsky seemingly suggests that the human mind, arguably the most intricate and mysterious biological system ever produced by the work of natural selection, might be described as simply and precisely as a molecule of benzene. Naturalism in the External Rhetoric of the Minimalist Program As I have suggested, one of the more remarkable features of Chomsky’s external argumentation in recent years has been his shift away from connecting the mind with dualist philosophers, instead framing the human brain as an object ultimately controlled by physical processes.277 Indeed, Chomsky has gone from connecting his work with the ideas of dualist philosophers to actively arguing against the dualist view of the mindbody problem — the latter rhetorical position being one of Chomsky’s most important external argumentative strategies under the Minimalist Program, Chomsky’s most recent version of generative grammar. Indeed, Chomsky has worked to craft a uniquely monist (a.k.a. a ‘naturalistic’) revolutionary vision for generative grammar under MP. Since this Accordingly, many of Chomsky’s monist proclamations seem remarkably similar to claims made by *gasp* Bloomfield. 277 Oenbring / 280 rhetorical shift, Chomsky has, characteristically, argued for monism vigorously, seemingly forgetting that he himself had been a champion of what he now disparagingly refers to as “methodological dualism” throughout most of his career. In his 2000 book New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind,278 Chomsky, for example, laments that dualist phantoms still haunt much inquiry into the study of language and mind, stating, for example, that: By “naturalism” I mean “methodological naturalism,” counterposed to “methodological dualism”: the doctrine that in the quest for theoretical understanding, language and mind are to be studied in some manner other than the ways we investigate natural objects, as a matter or principle. This is a doctrine that few may espouse, but that dominates much practice, I believe. (135) As we see in this quote, Chomsky has attempted in his recent externally focused argumentation to frame languages and minds as natural objects: objects that behave with the preciseness of physical laws, not biological systems. Once again, I argue that these moves are rhetorical; I argue that Chomsky has worked to craft this monist vision for generative grammar under MP in order to promote yet another would-be conceptual revolution. Indeed, Chomsky clearly uses visionary language to describe this new-found ‘naturalistic’ approach to the study of languages, stating in New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind that: 278 The volume New Horizons is, like Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar and The Minimalist Program, a collection of mostly previously published essays from the previous few years. Oenbring / 281 I would like to discuss an approach to the mind that considers language and similar phenomena to be elements of the natural world, to be studied by ordinary methods of empirical inquiry. I will be using the terms ‘mind’ and ‘mental’ here with no metaphysical import. Thus I understand ‘mental’ to be on par with ‘chemical,’ ‘optical,’ or ‘electrical’. (106) As we can see in this quote, in the external rhetoric of MP Chomsky clearly attempts to connect minds and languages with simple physical processes, a maneuver, I argue, designed for the purpose of framing languages in a way that makes them seemingly amenable to description using simple formal languages. Moreover, Chomsky’s attempt to suggest that languages and minds behave in a manner similar to physical processes is part and parcel of a broader rhetorical maneuver in the Minimalist Program: the claim that languages are optimally-designed systems (this is an issue that I will develop more in the next chapter). Having largely disavowed Descartes, Chomsky now interestingly associates another father of modern Western science with the notion of the creative aspect of language use, a scientist whose system has a much more mechanical allure: specifically Galileo. Chomsky begins his 1999 lecture at the Scuola Normal Superiore, Pisa, later printed as 2002’s On Nature and Language, by stating that: It would be appropriate to begin with some of the thoughts of the master, who does not disappoint us, even though the topics I want to discuss are remote from his primary concerns. Galileo may have been the first to recognize clearly the significance of the core property of human language, and one of its most Oenbring / 282 distinctive properties; the use of finite means to express an unlimited array of thoughts. (45) As this quote suggests, Chomsky still looks backward, connecting the beginning of inquiry into the creative aspect of language use with the very beginnings of modern Western science. However, he now associates the problem of our ability to make infinite syntactic strings out of finite means with a philosopher/scientist, Galileo, whose project worked to build optimism that we can develop mathematical descriptions of the laws of nature. While Chomsky’s popular-focused argumentation under the Aspects program was, through its promotion of the notion of well-formed ideas in the mind, designed to create a space for generative descriptions of the language (that is to say, Chomsky’s argumentation created a conceptual foundation that authorized generative grammar as a unique and valuable scientific discipline), Chomsky has, under MP, attempted to build the scientific prestige of generative grammar by suggesting that it can be a willing participant in an emerging unified totally material (a.k.a. a ‘naturalistic’) description of the mind. Indeed, Chomsky has attempted to rhetorically position generative grammar under MP as collapsing disciplinary boundaries. In New Horizons Chomsky questions those who would resist a unification of the sciences, arguing that: A naturalistic approach to language and mind will seek to improve each approach, hoping for more meaningful unification. It is common to suppose that there is something deeply problematic in the theory that is more solidly established on naturalistic grounds, the “mental one”; and to worry about problems of Oenbring / 283 “eliminationism” or “physicalism” that have yet to be formulated coherently. Furthermore, this dualist tendency not only dominates discussion and debate, but is virtually presupposed, a curious phenomenon of the history of thought that merits closer attention. (117) As this quote suggests, Chomsky has worked rhetorically under MP to revivify the program of generative grammar by positioning it as an approach to the study of languages most suited for participation in an emerging unified totally material description of the physiology of the mind.279 The Afterlife of Dualism in Generative Grammar While Chomsky argued vigorously in the sixties that linguistics should view itself as a branch of cognitive psychology (i.e., rather than a branch of anthropology or as a social science as many of the post-Bloomfiedians and other pre-Chomskyan linguists had done), generative grammarians for a long time did little to actually position their work as part of an emerging purely material description of the brain; although Chomsky achieved his institutional victory largely by positioning his work as laying bare the secrets of the human mind, he did not attempt to make his work agree with the findings and data of mainstream biologists or psychologists. That is to say, generative grammarians seemed perfectly happy (and many still do) to postulate their formal operations in the mind in 279 It should be noted, however, that Chomsky has, under the Minimalist Program, made these moves to lay a new monist foundation for generative grammar while frequently making unequivocally anti-foundational statements, often in very close quarters to his monist claims. That is to say, Chomsky has become more willing to accept under MP the idea that scholarly descriptions of nature may be always already theory-laden. Oenbring / 284 total disciplinary isolation, without much of any data from biology and psychology to support their findings. What’s more, whenever moments of contact between generative grammar and genuine psychologists and biologists have occurred, they have occurred largely on Chomsky’s terms. While the gap between generative grammarians and genuine biologists may seem to have waned in the past few decades (indeed, one of Chomsky’s most recent publications on the issue of language is his 2002 joint publication with two evolutionary biologists in Science “The Faculty of Language”), these moments of apparent interdisciplinary knowledge-building have largely occurred when the biologist has adopted the Chomsky/Fodor assumption that the mind is highly modular, consisting of autonomous systems (see, for example, Pinker’s The Language Instinct and Hauser’s Moral Minds). The notion that the mind is modular and made up of autonomous systems is still, however, hotly contested among cognitive scientists (see, for example, Uttal’s 2001 book The New Phrenology). Indeed, those biologists and cognitive scientists that have attempted to cross the divide between the physical matter of the brain and generative accounts necessarily seem to assume the existence of overly-idealized systems in the mind (e.g., Pinker’s language instinct). All of this suggests that the autonomy of generative grammar as an intelligible mode of inquiry seemingly relies upon keeping descriptions abstract and formal; generative grammar dissolves as an intelligible mode of inquiry when one attempts to cross the biology boundary and locate the formal systems in real matter. That is to say, despite Chomsky’s newfound monism, idealist and dualist Oenbring / 285 notions may have to continue to haunt generative grammar if it is to remain a distinct discipline. As I have suggested in this chapter, despite claiming that he is committed to a purely materialistic worldview, many of Chomksy’s arguments appear strangely dualistic. This is also the case with how Chomsky has dealt with the notion of the evolution of Universal Grammar. Indeed, Chomsky often dismisses attempts to connect the development of UG with the gradual evolution of real physiological structures (for an overview of this see Newmeyer’s piece in Hurford et al.’s edited volume Approaches to the Evolution of Language). Instead, Chomsky has expressed a commitment to describing the potentials of human syntax according to constraints imposed by a posited cognitive faculty, a faculty that he sees as autonomous (i.e., distinct from general intelligence and/or the physiology of articulation); Chomsky is interested merely in describing the potentials of UG, not questioning why or how it developed. Chomsky, strangely, even argues consistently against the notion that UG could have been produced by the work of natural selection. Newmeyer, for example, notes that “Chomsky appears to be perfectly willing to regard UG as unique in the natural world, immune, it would seem, from the set of forces that shape other biological systems” (Newmeyer 306). It is, indeed, interesting that Chomsky still maintains the position that UG was not selected for by the work of evolution under the Minimalist Program, where much of the rhetorical focus is on the supposed perfection of human languages. How UG could ever become a perfectly-formed biological system without the work of natural selection remains quite a mystery. What’s more, many biologists are even hesitant to suggest that natural selection Oenbring / 286 could ever produce a perfectly formed system without vestigial structures (i.e., evolutionary residue of no particular use) (see, for example, Gould and Lewontin [1979]).280 Chomsky has, nevertheless, attempted to reconcile the tensions between his commitment to monism and his desire to describe language as an autonomous, perfectlyformed system by suggesting that much of the content of UG, the cognitive structures that distinguish humans from hominids and apes not capable of elaborate syntactic constructions, was a coded by a great mutation of a single gene. This move is, of course, rhetorical. Chomsky has attempted to maintain the autonomy of generative grammar by radically reducing the scope of the biological processes that need to be deciphered for Universal Grammar to be totally decoded: the effects of merely one gene. This move is rhetorical for the following reason: by reducing the scope of the physiological process that need to be deciphered Chomsky can frame the mind in such a way that generative grammarians can maintain hope that we may someday develop a rich description of UG. Nevertheless, by suggesting that that the faculty of language developed almost instantaneously and now behaves perfectly, Chomsky seems eerily close to suggesting language did not evolve, but was rather instilled by the touch of God. A Stylistic Analysis of Chomsky’s Use of Genre In the remainder of this chapter I present the findings of a short corpus study that I have conducted, using corpora that I have developed for each of Chomsky’s genres / For an incisive, accessible analysis of Chomsky’s views regarding evolution see Dennet’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. 280 Oenbring / 287 registers that I have analyzed in this chapter. Although the texts included in the corpora are not some of Chomsky’s more influential texts, this does not weaken the possible interest of the study. The goal of the study is to understand the conventions of Chomsky’s various genres, and any of his texts within those genres should seemingly do equally well. I have chosen the texts that I have in each of the corpora because they are widely available in electronic form on the web.281 While I have tried to include in each of the corpora a balance of recent and old texts, the contents of the corpora are skewed toward more recent texts as a whole, as those are more likely to be widely available on the web and/or accessible directly in electronic form through my university library’s subscriptions.282 The corpora for each of the genres are of comparable size (each on the order of 40,000 words).283 For the study I used two common software platforms for corpus linguistic research: AntConc (a freeware concordance program developed by Laurence Anthony of Waseda University, Japan) and WordSmith Tools 4.0 (a common lexical frequency, keyword, and concordance package distributed by Oxford University Press). (I also used these corpora to produce the pictorial representations of word frequencies [using the Wordle technology284 developed by Jonathan Feinberg of IBM Global Research] that I have presented in several places in this study.) 281 I list the source texts for all three corpora at the end of this chapter. This is especially the case with the technical corpus, which includes two recent unpublished manuscripts. 283 The technical corpus is a total of 40,131 words. The political corpus comes to a total of 41,662. As there are fewer historical/philosophical texts widely available on the web, the total for the historical/philosophical corpus is only 26,559 words. 284 Check it out at http://www.wordle.net/ 282 Oenbring / 288 In Table 2, I present some basic statistics regarding the three corpora. Not surprisingly, the technical corpus has higher average word length (characters per word), no doubt due to specialized terminology such as interface and movement. The remaining measures presented in the chart are, however, somewhat surprising. Perhaps the most interesting finding in this chart is the difference in average sentence length between the historical/philosophical (30) and political (27.7) corpora and the technical corpus (8.8). The shorter average sentence length of the technical corpus leads to a greater Flesch Reading Ease285 score, a broadly-used measure (probably most notably [or notoriously] by Microsoft Word). That the technical corpus would receive the highest Flesch Reading Ease score runs counter to expectations. Basic Corpora Statistics Historical/Philosophical Corpus Words per Sentence Characters per Word Passive Sentences Flesch Reading Ease Political Corpus 30 27.7 Technical Corpus 8.8 5.1 21% 5 17% 5.2 8% 33.9 33.8 46.6 Table 2 Nevertheless, we are led to a few broad conclusions by these basic statistics. First of all, the prose of the political texts and the historical/philosophical texts are similar 285 Flesch Reading Ease score is calculated with the following formula: 206.835 – (1.015 x average sentence length) – (84.6 x average number of syllables per word) Oenbring / 289 to one another. Broadly stated, we can suggest that Chomsky’s historical/philosophical work and his political work have what we might call essayistic prose. Conversely, we might say that the technical corpus, having shorter sentence length and even significantly fewer passive voice constructions, has stripped down prose. Indeed, one might suggests that Chomsky writes in this stripped down manner in his technical pieces to build the scientific ethos of his accounts. I now move to my study of keywords for each corpus using WordSmith Tools software. Programs such as WordSmith tools produce keyword lists by comparing the frequency of lexical items in one corpus with the frequency of the same lexical item in another reference corpus. For this study, I have chosen to use the other two Chomskyan corpora as reference corpora for determining the keywords of the third. This is a particularly valuable approach for highlighting the differences in word choice in each of the corpora. I have limited the keywords that I report to the first twenty results. I refer to the first twenty suggested by the software as the entire set of keywords. As can be expected, the keyword lists for the technical corpus when using both the political corpus and the historical/philosophical corpus as reference corpora are dominated by the technical vocabulary of generative grammar (including terms like phase, merge, spec, head, and movement). Technical Corpus Keyword N TECHNICAL W/ POLITICAL TECHNICAL W/ HP Oenbring / 290 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 LANGUAGE C V T PHASE INTERFACE MERGE SPEC FEATURES PROPERTIES HEAD MOVEMENT PROBE UG FEATURE IM STRUCTURE COMPUTATION SYNTACTIC MIT C T V PHASE MERGE SPEC MOVEMENT INTERFACE MIT UG AGREEMENT IM HEAD PROBE XP CI SMT FEATURE EDGE OPERATIONS Table 3 Interestingly, initialsms are common in the both keyword lists for the technical corpus. The place that UG (the intialism form of Universal Grammar) takes in both keyword lists for the technical corpus is particularly interesting, and, moreover, supports the claim that Chomsky willingly chooses initialisms and other technical-sounding language in his technical works in order to support the scientific ethos and disciplinary autonomy of generative grammar. Oenbring / 291 Similarly, as could be expected, both keyword lists for the historical/philosophical corpus are dominated by terms that Chomsky uses when talking about large scale methodological and philosophical issues (e.g., innate, language, grammar, mind). As a whole, this finding supports the claim that world creation is one of the primary rhetorical tasks of the historical/philosophical genre (see Table 4). Historical/Philosophical Corpus Keywords Oenbring / 292 N HP W/ TECHNICAL HP W/ POLITICAL 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 LANGUAGE GRAMMAR PROPERTIES LANGUAGES SYSTEMS INNATE MENTAL IS THEORY THAT MIND STRUCTURE OF LEARNING NATURAL HUMAN STUDY SYSTEM GENERATIVE LINGUISTIC INNATE MIND HUMAN THIS HE HIS NATURALISTIC OF KNOWLEDGE WORLD CERTAIN GRAMMAR ORGANISATION MENTAL WE SCIENCE STUDY BEHAVIOUR PSYCHOLOGY LECTURE Table 4 Another interesting finding in the lists of keywords for the historical/philosophical corpus is that the personal pronouns we and he (as well as the possessive adjective form his) show up in the keyword list when the technical genre is used as the reference corpus, but not when the political genre is used as the reference corpus. As a whole, Chomsky’s increased use of personal pronouns in the historical/philosophical texts can be seen as evidence for the reduced formality and the more general audience of the historical/philosophical texts in comparison to the technical texts. A search of the concordance of he and his using WordSmith suggests that Chomsky usually uses the Oenbring / 293 terms in the historical/philosophical texts in one of two ways: either to refer to the work of other scholars (e.g., “Most certainly Hume was wrong when he wanted to derive all that is a priori from that which the senses supply …”) or to speak of a general human subject, often named ‘Jones’ (e.g., “If Jones has the language L, he knows many things: for example, that house rhymes with mouse”). The keywords for Chomsky’s political texts are, similarly, not as a whole surprising, reflecting the general concerns of Chomsky’s political texts. Keywords that appear in the top twenty when using either the technical or the historical/philosophical corpus as the reference include the following: war, American, states, policy, international, political, united, and military. A slightly more interesting finding is that was appears as a keyword when using either the technical or the historical/philosophical texts as reference corpus, and that had appears as a keyword with the technical corpus as reference, indicating the greater preference for the past tense (or participle constructions) and, presumably, the narration of past events in the political texts. Political Corpus Keywords N POLITICAL W/ TECHNICAL POLITICAL W/HP Oenbring / 294 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 WAR THE AMERICAN STATES PEOPLE WAS POWER WORLD INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL GOVERNMENT US UNITED POLICY FOREIGN OUR HE MILITARY UN HAD AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL WAR US GOVERNMENT WHO UNITED POLICY FOREIGN STATES POLITICAL MILITARY THE WAS UN AGREEMENT CHINA WASHINGTON VIETNAM BOMBING Table 5 Perhaps the most remarkable finding of the keyword list for the political corpus is the presence of the definite article the with both the technical and the historical/philosophical texts as reference corpus. As a whole, this may indicate that writers may demonstrate a greater preference for the definite article when they, as Chomsky does in his political texts, relate past and present events that occur in the real world — rather than in an abstracted world of scholarly theorizing. Oenbring / 295 I now complete my corpus study by presenting lists of 3-grams for each of the corpora —lists developing using the AntConc package. 3-grams are reoccurring strings of three words. For this study, I present the top fifteen most frequent 3-grams for each corpus. As in the keyword search, the 3-grams for the technical corpus are dominated by nuanced, technical expressions used among generative grammarians that Chomsky has authorized and promoted. (One should note that the technical corpus is slanted highly toward Chomsky’s most recent texts.) Of particular interest are expressions like the c-I interface, the phase head, and the faculty of language. Technical Corpus 3-Grams Rank 1 2 3 4 4 5 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 14 14 3-Gram in terms of the c-i interface the theory of the driver picture the phase head the phase level at the phase faculty of language has to be the faculty of the mapping to the sm interface there is no it is not three factors in Frequency 35 26 20 18 18 16 15 15 15 15 15 15 15 14 14 Table 6 Oenbring / 296 The 3-gram list for the historical/philosophical corpus demonstrates the large-scale methodological focus of these texts, including strings like: the study of, the language faculty, the problem of, the theory of, study of language. While the 3-grams for the historical/philosophical corpus are less technical, they are, understandably, largely examples of what we might call academic idiom. Historical / Philosophical Corpus 3-Grams Rank 1 2 3 3 5 5 7 7 9 10 11 11 13 13 13 3-Gram Frequency the study of 42 the language faculty 24 and so on 22 the problem of 22 of the world 17 seems to me 17 of the language 16 there is no 16 it is not 15 aspects of the 14 it seems to 13 the theory of 13 study of language 12 the case of 12 the fact that 12 Table 7 Finally, perhaps the most remarkable finding of the 3-gram list for the political corpus is the common occurrence of both place and item names (see figure 8). The list of 3-grams Oenbring / 297 for the political corpus includes: the United States, the West Bank, the Soviet Union, and both New York Times and the New York. Political Corpus 3-Grams Rank 1 2 3 4 4 4 7 7 7 7 7 12 12 12 15 3-Gram the united states new york times the new york for example the one of the the fact that the enlightened states the responsibility of the right to the us and the west bank at the time in the west in the world the soviet union Frequency 51 23 15 12 12 12 11 11 11 11 11 10 10 10 9 Table 8 As in the list of keywords for the political corpus, the definite article the is overrepresented in the 3-grams for the political corpus. In fact, the only 3-gram in the top fifteen of the political corpus that does not include the is new york times (obviously a fragment of the new york times). This can, perhaps, be attributed to the fact that the object of the political texts is the real world. While the earlier statistical measures of the corpora seemed to suggest extensive similarities between the prose styles of the historical/philosophical texts and the political texts, only one phrase that we might call personal idiom (the fact that) shows up in the lists of 3-grams for both. Oenbring / 298 Conclusion As I have noted, Chomsky’s first confrontation with philosophy in the early fifties was an attempt to put to work a rigorous set of methods for use in analyzing the syntax of human languages. Conversely, Chomsky’s later confrontations with philosophy in these historical/philosophical texts are designed to help Chomsky explain the distinguishing features of his system, and by turns, to build the revolutionary ethos / identity of generative work. While Chomsky’s early confrontations with philosophy were attempts to appropriate contemporary methods, Chomsky’s later explanatory historical/philosophical texts are governed by appeals to ‘classic’ figures in early modern philosophy and science. One of the primary functions of these historical/philosophical appeals is to frame Chomsky’s work as in dialogue with the masters, an appeal that no doubt has a much greater effect on broader audiences rather than technical audiences. (Indeed, why else, other than to build his authority as a classic figure, would Chomsky bother in 2006 to release a third edition of Language and Mind, a book presenting a series of claims that he has long since abandoned or updated?) While Chomsky uses these historical/philosophical appeals to invoke the authority of tradition, he also uses them to help craft the revolutionary identity of his work; Chomsky finds precedent in previous, ‘classic’ scientific revolutions to build the case for the one he is attempting to develop in the present. Conversely, in his technical texts Chomsky sponsors methodological machinery serving, in effect, to constitute the community of generative grammarians. By sponsoring new sets of terminology, Oenbring / 299 Chomsky can create competing factions, granting one the legitimacy of his authority. By adopting the technical methods of non-generative groups, he can make their techniques part of the model; he can co-opt their methods. What’s more, by relabeling and rerationalizing technical methods, Chomsky can create the appearance of progress in the model. The evidence suggests that Chomsky’s strategic deployment of his repertoire of genres is an important element of his rhetoric: his available means of persuasion. Oenbring / 300 Corpora Contents Historical/Philosophical Corpus Chomsky, Noam. Language and Mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968. 58 -85. 29 Jan 2008 <http:// http://www.chomsky.info/books/mind01.htm>. ——. “Language as a Natural Object.” Mind. 104 (1995): 1-61. Technical Corpus ——. “Approaching UG from Below.” Unpublished manuscript. 2006. 29 Jan. 2008. <http://www.punksinscience.org/kleanthes/courses/MATERIALS/Chomsky_Ap proaching-UG.pdf>. ——. “On Phases.” Unpublished manuscript. 2005. 29 Jan 2008. <http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/hans/mrg/chomsky_onphases_1204.pdf>. ——. “Three Factors in Language Design.” Linguistic Inquiry 36 (2005): 1-22. Political Corpus ——. “Free Market Rhetoric.” Lies of our Times. 7 Jan. 1994. 29 Jan. 2008. <http://www.e-text.org/text/Chomsky - free market rhetoric.rtf>. ——. “The Israel-Arafat Agreement.” Z Magazine. Oct. 1993. 29 Jan. 2008. <http://www.e-text.org/text/Chomsky - The Israel Arafat Agreement.doc>. ——. “Jubilee 2000.” ZNet. 15 May 1998. 29 Jan. 2008. <http://www.e -text.org/text/Chomsky - cancel 3rd world debt.rtf>. Oenbring / 301 ——. “Kosovo Peace Accord.” Z Magazine. Jul. 1999. 29 Jan. 2008. <http://www.e -text.org/text/Chomsky - kosovo.rtf>. ——. “Libya.” Lies of our Times. Jan. 1992. 29 Jan. 2008. <http://www.e text.org/text/Chomsky - libya.rtf>. ——. From The New Statesman. Jul. 1994. 29 Jan. 2008. <http://www.e -text.org/text/Chomsky - new statesman.rtf>. ——. “The Passion for Free Markets.” Z Magazine. May 1997. 29 Jan. 2008. <http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/may97chomsky.html>. ——. “Responsibility of Intellectuals.” The New York Review of Books. 23 Feb. 1967. 29 Jan. 2008. <http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19670223.htm>. ——. “Terrorism, American Style.” World Policy Journal. 24 (2007): 44-45. ——. “The War in Afghanistan.” New Delhi Online. 30 Dec. 2001. 29 Jan. 2008. <http://www.e-text.org/text/Chomsky - on afghanistan.doc>. Oenbring / 302 Chapter 7: The Rhetoric of the Minimalist Program “Socrates’ existence is irony … he is continually just touching the ground, but since the real kingdom of ideality is still foreign to him, he has not as yet emigrated to it but seems always to be on the point of departure. Irony oscillates between the ideal I and the empirical I; the one would make Socrates a philosopher, the other a Sophist.” Kierkegaard, “The Concept of Irony” “We seem forced to the conclusion that a not insignificant part of our field is laboring under the manufacture of consent.” Lappin, Levine, and Johnson, “The Structure of Unscientific Revolutions” Introduction With later-EST less popular among generative grammarians than the Aspects program or even the “Remarks” framework — and an embarrassment of counterevidence to the models he was proposing popping up — Chomsky was playing defense in the late 1970s. While generative grammar had always been rationalized with the notion that the evaluation of theories is more interesting than the facts in themselves, in the late seventies Chomsky began to go further in search of a defensive rhetoric; he began to claim that isolated empirical facts cannot, in themselves, refute theories. Recall Chomsky’s suggestion in Essays on Form and Interpretation (1977) that “to support or refute a proposed condition, it does not suffice to cite examples of grammatical or ungrammatical constructions from some language, or other informant judgments or Oenbring / 303 observed phenomena. The empirical facts do indeed bear on the correctness of a theory of conditions on rules, but only indirectly” (21). That is to say, empirical facts are not in and of themselves interesting; only elegant explanatory systems are interesting. Similarly, in the late seventies, Chomsky began to make appeals to the “logically necessary” nature of a rich Universal Grammar. Chomsky, for example, suggests in Essays that the UG that generative grammarians describe is consists of the “’logically necessary’ or ’conceptually necessary’ properties of language” (Essays on Form and Interpretation 2).286 Framing these ideas for a popular audience, Chomsky during later-EST imported into linguistic theory the notion of the Galilean style of inquiry: to proceed under the faith that a mathematically-elegant way of describing nature exists even when most available evidence suggests that such a model is not possible or that inquiry is on the wrong track. Chomsky, for example, claims in his 1980287 historical/philosophical volume Rules and Representations that: But what I am interested here is a different question: To what extent and in what ways can inquiry in something like “the Galilean style” yield insight and understanding of the roots of human nature in the cognitive domain? Can we hope to move beyond superficiality by a readiness to undertake perhaps far-reaching idealizations and to construct abstract models that are accorded more significance than the ordinary world of sensation, and correspondingly, by readiness to tolerate Indeed, as Seuren (2004) notes, “conceptual necessity” is “not a clear or precise notion but is, in fact, no more than an intuition to the effect that, as far as he can see, things could not have been otherwise” (139). 287 Although published in 1980 Rules and Representations is made up of several public lectures Chomsky gave in the late seventies. 286 Oenbring / 304 unexplained phenomena or even as yet unexplained counterevidence to theoretical constructions that have achieved a certain degree of explanatory adequacy depth in some limited domain, much as Galileo did not abandon his enterprise because he was unable to give a coherent explanation for the fact that objects do not fly off the earth’s surface? (9-10) By claiming that inquiry into human languages must, for the time being, proceed under the “Galilean style,” a concept that he borrows from physicist Stephen Weinberg and traces back to Husserl, Chomsky draws upon the authority of one of the founding fathers of modern science: Galileo. What’s more, Chomsky makes it appear that to do otherwise than proceed without blind faith that the project is getting somewhere is to give up on the project of knowledge-building, clearly a powerful appeal. While Chomsky developed the notions of the “Galilean style” and “logical necessity” in the late 1970s, he only used those notions in a short-lived manner at the time; they were not the central pillars of his theories at the time. What’s more, he did not make them central elements of the rhetoric of the GB/ P and P revolution. Rather than invoking Galileo, Chomsky spoke, as I have noted, of Plato’s Problem to support the GB/P and P revolution. However, Chomsky has recently resurrected these notions, using them as central pillars of his most recent would-be methodological revolution: The Minimalist Program. In this chapter, I begin with an overview of several of the unique features of the Minimalist Program and its rhetoric. I then analyze several the historical precursors of the rhetoric of the Minimalist Program, both within Chomsky’s own work and across the Oenbring / 305 history of the study of language. As I do in chapters two and three, I then provide an overview of the rhetorical maneuvers that Chomsky partook in the historical development of this most recent program. Next I overview the reception of Chomsky’s Minimalist Program, both among his followers and his critics, with the goal of providing some insight into how Chomsky’s theories quickly achieved dominance in established intellectual communities. I then end this chapter and this study with return to an explicit focus on Chomsky’s rhetoric, with a broad analysis of his rhetoric both specific to the Minimalist Program and throughout his career. Ending with the Minimalist Program is appropriate not only because it is the most recent program Chomsky has attempted to sponsor, but also because Chomsky’s arguments have become more ambiguously realist under the Minimalist Program. That is to say, Chomsky’s revolutions may finally be withering; he is finally ceding some ground, at least implicitly, to rhetoric. Although a thorough overview of all the lines of inquiry that have been spawned by Chomsky and other generative scholars is outside the scope of this study, I shall here give a brief overview of the salient rhetorical and methodological elements of MP. For more developed yet still accessible analyzes of Chomsky’s project in the Minimalist Program, I recommend Seuren (2004) and Berwick (1998). What I attempt to present in this section is a distillation of MP as it is manifested in both supporters of MP, including Chomsky, and in critics of the program. One should, however, always keep in mind that insofar as MP is an intelligible system, this is due to Chomsky’s own rhetorical work. Indeed, one of Chomsky’s central rhetorical feats in moving generative grammar to the Minimalist Program has been, as with his previous revolutions, articulating — and Oenbring / 306 presenting as a distinct and coherent whole — the core claims of the program, and having those claims adopted widely by generative grammarians and the broader community of linguists. Overview of the Minimalist Program As I note in the previous chapter, the central claims of the Minimalist Program are Chomsky’s emphasis on the perfection of human language and his desire to treat human languages like natural, not biological, systems. For example, in his 1998 essay “Minimalist Inquiries: The Framework,” Chomsky asks “How close does language come to what some super-engineer would construct, given the conditions that the language faculty must satisfy? How ‘perfect’ is language, to put it picturesquely?” (5). Chomsky then answers his question, suggesting that we have “reason to believe that the answer is ‘surprisingly perfect’” (5). The attendant other core claim of the MP is that linguists should look for the simplest, most economical theories to describe human language; this is because human syntax, apparently, is “surprisingly perfect.” Broadly stated, MP takes one of the boldest assumptions of generative grammar — namely the well-formed nature of natural languages — and pushes it to its logical conclusion. More technically stated, MP proceeds under the assumption that languages are perfectly-formed machines for interfacing with the A-P (Articulatory-Perceptual) and the C-I (Conceptual-Intentional) systems. The levels that interface with the A-P and C-I systems are Phonetic Form (PF) (basically the current incarnation of what used to be called surface structure) and Logical Form (LF) (basically the current version of deep Oenbring / 307 structure) respectively. These divides have been labeled central elements of Chomsky’s most recent program in both critiques (see, for example, Johnson and Lappin 1999) and in work supporting the Minimalist Program. Hendrick, for example, notes that MP “places a significant explanatory burden on how syntax facilitates, and perhaps even optimizes, the interpretation of interfacing cognitive systems” (Hendrick 3). More technically stated, under MP a derivation (the current word for a string of syntax) must “converge” at its interface levels LF and PF. If it cannot do this, the derivation crashes. Another distinction that Chomsky and others claim to exist is that whereas GB/P and P was representational, MP is derivational. By representational generative theorists mean that emphasis is placed on the different levels of representation ([e.g., DStructure, S-Structure, LF, and PF]) and the interaction of the different modules of language (e.g., binding theory, θ-theory, Case theory, etc.) at those different levels of representation. Conversely, by suggesting MP to be derivational, generative theorists place less emphasis on the different levels of representation, with well-formedness constraints applying only to the fully-formed syntactic string/derivation at a limited number of levels of representation (merely LF and PF in Chomsky [1995]). Thus, economy constraints in Chomsky’s purest version of MP are said to be global rather than local (for more, see Johnson and Lappin 13). Before the complete derivation can interface with LF or PF, the derivation is built by the operations Merge and Move in a bottom-up (see, Chomsky [2006]) manner. Merge and Move form the backbone of the technical machinery of MP as promoted by Chomsky. The fact that mechanisms for building derivations in the MP are claimed to Oenbring / 308 rely upon fewer distinct operations may appear to make the whole system simpler. Chomsky argues that Move takes place as a “last resort,” a proposition that leads to a simplicity claim.288 However, as always, the empirical motivation for this machinery seems lacking. (In fact, claiming that he is simplifying the machinery of the whole system by suggesting that all theories of movement can be collapsed into unified mechanism is a rhetorical tack that Chomsky has tried before, with the notion of Move α in the extended standard theory.) Generative grammarians have always had a problem with confusing formalism with explanation, and MP continues in this tradition. Critiquing Chomsky’s theories in the seventies, Givón warns us in his On Understanding Grammar that formalism cannot be conflated with explanation, arguing that “being only a formal summary of the raw facts, a formal model cannot ‘make empirical claims,’ since this would … amount to a tautology” (6). Critiquing the Minimalist Program specifically, Seuren (2004) claims that “despite its overall realist stance, the MP shows features of extreme formalism, in the sense that the formalism, once established, is made to prevail over available (counter)evidence” (118). That is to say, although Chomsky has always seemed to place evidence-massaging and theory-building before broad empirical support, the Minimalist Program takes a more extreme form of this commitment. MP is, indeed, the most theory-internal, abstract, and most inaccessible to outsiders of all the programs of research Chomsky has proposed. Lappin, Levine, and For example, Chomsky (1995) claims that “the principle of economy of derivation requires that computational operations must be driven by some condition on representations, as a ‘last resort’ to overcome a failure to meet such a condition” (28). 288 Oenbring / 309 Johnson claim, for example, in their 2000 review piece “The Structure of Unscientific Revolutions” that “MP looks like an awkward transcendental deduction of Universal Grammar” (666). That is to say, Chomsky’s Minimalist Program is similar in form to previous programs that Chomsky has proposed and is similarly lacking in empirical motivation, but, due to the time that the central theoretical constructs have been on the scene (e.g., a divide between a level of sound and a level of meaning and the notion of universal grammar), Chomsky can support these central theoretical constructs by appeals to their logical necessity. Indeed, at times, what Chomsky seems to be calling for is more massaging and reformulation of theories than genuine evidence-based inquiry. This has led many scholars to charge that the path that Chomsky is leading linguists down has more to with engineering than science (engineering minus useful technologies that is). Johnson and Lappin claim, for example, that Chomsky’s notion that language is a perfect system is “essentially an engineering notion” (Johnson and Lappin 1999: 125) that has nothing to do with biological systems.289 Nevertheless, Chomsky routinely claims the Minimalist Program it is a “program, not a theory” (1998: 5). By this, Chomsky means that MP is a set of theoretical and methodological commitments (e.g., ‘economy’) rather than a putative explanatory theory of language in and of itself. What’s more, “there are minimalist questions, but no minimalist answers, apart from those found in pursuing the program” (1998: 5). That is to say, the ‘answers’ given by inquiry in the Minimalist Program will always already be theory-laden. Indeed, at several points in work under the Minimalist Program, Chomsky 289 Indeed, Chomsky even characterizes the Minimalist Program as studying language from the vantage point of “superbly-competent engineer.” Oenbring / 310 admits confusion with his own theoretical constructs. Chomsky, for example, claims in “Economy of Derivation” that “exactly how these principles of interaction among levels should be understood is not entirely clear” (Economy of Derivation 132). 290 Terminology in the Minimalist Program As he often has when introducing a new program for generative grammar, Chomsky has introduced a host of new points of identity / god-terms along with the MP. Some of the most important of these new terms I have already touched upon, including: the derivational / representational dichotomy; the notions as the C-I and A-P interfaces (the latter more recently renamed the S-M [Sensory-Motor] interface); and the notion of methodological naturalism. Other points of identity that Chomsky has promoted under the MP include: the faculty of language or, depending on the publication, the language faculty (Chomsky’s most current term[s] for describing what he has previously referred to as universal grammar and/or the language organ); Language Acquisition Device (something Chomsky admits is just another name for these same terms); discrete infinity; optimality, a broader movement and trend in linguistics that Chomsky has promoted his own distinct version of; and, most recently, the notion of biolinguistics, a term reasserting generative linguistics’ claim to be grounded in language as biology. As has been widely noted, highly theoretical lines of inquiry that take place on a level of abstraction pushing the limits of comprehension of the human mind often rely heavily on metaphorical and figurative language. The clearest case of this is theoretical What’s more, theoretical constructs that do not seem necessary Chomsky often speaks of as “imperfections” rather than theories. 290 Oenbring / 311 and particle physics (see, for example, Stahl’s “Physics as Metaphor”). For example, just to limit ourselves to the notion of quarks — itself a term borrowed from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake — we find all of the following concepts and terms at use in scholarly discourse: gluons (the things that ‘glue’ quarks together); charm; color, beauty, and even truth. With the program taking a turn for the theory-internal, many of the notions that Chomsky has sponsored in MP seem to have taken a similar turn for the metaphorical. Following Chomsky (1993), one of the major theoretical notions used by MP generative grammarians is the notion of “greediness” of movements in derivations (see, for example, Martin in Working Minimalism). For example, Chomsky (1993) proposes the notions “Procrastinate” (200), “Last Resort” (200), and “Greed” (201). There Chomsky notes that “Last Resort, then, is always ‘self-serving’: benefiting other elements is not allowed” (201). Chomsky continues, “alongside Procrastinate, then we have the principle of Greed: self-serving Last Resort.” (Whereas the metaphors of Government and Binding are totalitarian, the metaphors of MP are individualist/libertarian.) Nonetheless, Chomsky denies the metaphorical nature of these terms. Chomsky, for example, claims in The Architecture of Language that “‘procrastinate’ is a kind of semi-joke to keep things picturesque and intelligible. Same with ‘greed’. I don’t think the choice of terms means anything” (65). Acknowledged or not, metaphorical terminology has become more common within generative discourse under MP. Just to look at a small part of Chomsky’s 1993 essay “A Minimalist Program,” we see Chomsky using extensive metaphorical language. Oenbring / 312 In a small section of the essay, Chomsky argues that “case features appear at PF, but must be ‘visible’ at LF” (197). Similarly, “’strong’ features are visible at PF and ‘weak’ features are invisible at PF” (198). With Chomsky himself putting his metaphorical terminology in scare quotes, commentaries on the Minimalist Program have to use Chomsky’s specific phrasing in order to explain Chomsky’s claims. Frequently using the construction something ‘is said to’ to describe the commitments of the Minimalist Program, Seuren (2004) notes that “the operations Select and Merge are said to be ‘conceptually necessary’ — hence, ‘costless’ in terms of the economy metric invoked for selecting the optimal derivation from a set of alternatives” (34). Accordingly, commentaries on Chomsky’s Minimalist Program often rely heavily on Chomsky’s specific wording, and have become more textual commentary than assessments of a method believed to exist outside of its manifestations in texts; analyses of MP are often more close readings of Chomsky’s texts than analyses of methods. A New Rhetorical Tack? Despite the fact that generative grammar under MP remains as byzantine as ever, the overarching rhetoric of the Minimalist Program is, I must again emphasize, simplicity. While Chomsky and his followers maintain the point of identity that MP simplifies the elaborate machinery of GB/P and P, the specific machinery of MP appears only tenuously inspired by minimalist commitments. Indeed, Seuren (2004) claims that: Oenbring / 313 the minimalist principles and assumptions are accompanied by a large amount of grammatical machinery said to follow from them. The fact that the grammatical machinery does not follow from the minimalist principles and assumptions calls into question not only the grammatical machinery itself but also the MP as a whole … The Minimalist Program is full of promises, but there is no collateral. In the end, one is left with a story that is partly an incoherent fantasy … and partly a repetition of old principles and methods (Seuren 2004: 14) Nevertheless, Chomsky seems committed, at least rhetorically, to the belief that MP simplifies the program of generative grammar. While MP makes claims to simplify the elaborate machinery of GB/P and P, it does so only by making the machinery more complicated in certain places. Indeed, MP, as all the programs of generative grammar Chomsky has sponsored is not a logically-coherent set of propositions. Rather, MP, like all previous programs that Chomsky has sponsored is merely a new set of specific machinery and broad commitments held together by Chomsky’s authority and name. Although Chomsky and his followers have done their best to frame the Minimalist Program a something totally new (Freidin, for example, suggests that MP is a “a major breakthrough … to a new level of abstraction” [1997: 214, cited in Seuren 2004: 11]), the concerns and the rhetoric of the Minimalist Program are by no means new within the history of linguistics — or even within Chomsky’s own project. As I have noted, Chomsky’s appeals to “Galilean style” and the “logically necessary” nature of UG are strategies that he developed in the late seventies, but he has made more prominent in Oenbring / 314 recent work. Instead, these concerns are framed as new within the revolutionary rhetoric of the MP; they are the new god-terms of the current program. While Chomsky and his followers would like you to believe that his interest in notions of economy developed suddenly in a late-eighties, early-nineties epiphany, the notion of economy, a central pillar of the Minimalist Program, is merely a newly-adopted rhetorical pillar — not a new concern — for Chomsky. In fact, one can trace appeals to notions of economy back to some of Chomsky’s earliest work; it was a notion Chomsky received from Harris and analytic philosophers like Goodman. Chomsky suggests, for example, in his 1951 M.A. essay The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew that “the grammar must be designed in such a way as to be the most efficient, economical, and elegant device” (3). Neither is the young Chomsky the originator of interest in notions of economy; analytic philosophers made appeals to notions of economy, their own version of Ockham’s razor, well before Chomsky’s appearance.291 What’s more, Chomsky and his followers claims under MP that syntactic strings behave more like physical laws of nature than the objects of biological systems has precursors in the history of linguistics, particularly among 19th Century German historical linguists. For example, starting around the time of Jacob Grimm’s impressive empirical achievements in postulating a series of rules for the development of proto-Germanic out of proto-Indoeuropean, scholars spoke openly of sound laws (“Lautgesetze”), despite the 291 In fact, one of the primary exponents of the notion of economy was Nelson Goodman, one of Chomsky’s instructors at Penn. Indeed, Goodman’s essay “On the Simplicity of Ideas,” a text that claims that “the motives for seeking economy in the basis of a system are much the same as the motives for constructing the system itself” (107), is one of only five sources of Chomsky’s Morphophonemics. Oenbring / 315 fact Grimm’s sound change ‘laws’ were, in fact, historical reconstructions, not immutable laws of nature. Later in the century linguists, including most famously August Schleicher, would suggest that human languages are themselves organisms in nature; languages, these linguists claimed, are natural systems, natural systems living outside of human biology. But the most radical rhetorical tack reminiscent of the Minimalist Program taken by 19th Century German linguists was, however, the claims of the so-called neoGrammarians (e.g., Brugman and Osthoff). The organizing point of identity for these neo-Grammarians was that sound change takes place according to immutable laws of nature which are “exceptionless” (Brugman and Osthoff, cited in Collinge 205) and take place with “a blind and inescapable necessity” (Osthoff, cited in Collinge 205).292 These claims were made in order to distinguish their work as more scientific than early historical studies of language, which were dismissed as “’grey theories,’ ‘voyaging with no compass,’ or ‘paper linguistics’” (Collinge 205). The neo-grammarians made these claims for the purposes of identity building and boundary maintenance. This rhetorical posture is similar to generative grammar, particularly so under the Minimalist Program, in several ways. For one, it treats languages as physical objects of nature that occur according to immutable physical laws. What’s more, both neo-grammarian doctrine and MP proceed under the assumption that language must act in the way they believe it acts out of logical necessity; they both appear as transcendental deductions of the researchers’ core commitments. 292 For all quotes from Brugmann and Osthoff, see Schneider (1973: 19-53). Oenbring / 316 Rhetorical Development of the Minimalist Program As with Chomsky’s other programs, there is no clear beginning to the Minimalist Program. Although Chomsky’s 1986 book Barriers is usually viewed as a major piece of GB/P and P, in historical perspective, the book should properly be understood as containing the earliest inkling of what would eventually become Chomsky’s most recent program, as one of the major concerns of the book is the “Minimality Condition” (e.g., 10, 12, 42): basically, that for a governor to be a governor it must be the ‘closest governor’ to the object it governs (i.e., in one of his less technical explications, Chomsky suggests that ‘α does not govern β … if there is a “closer governor’” [10]). Two years later in 1988, Chomsky released the important manuscript “Some Notes on Economy of Derivation and Representation,” a piece first published in Freidin’s 1991 edited volume Principles and Parameters in Comparative Grammar.293 Inspired by Barriers and “Some Notes on Economy,” Chomsky’s follower and collaborator Rizzi first made minimalism a central element of generative inquiry in his 1990 study Relativized Minimality. Note that it was Rizzi, not Chomsky, that began to treat the notion of minimalism as a god-term. Although less clearly a good-cop bad-cop ploy than Lees’ review of Syntactic Structures, Relativized Minimality, with a specific focus on the Minimality Principle, did much to begin institutionalizing minimalism as a While “Some Notes on Economy” would provide much of the backbone of what eventually would be the Minimalist Program, it is important to remember that the Minimalist Program did not exist yet. Indeed, like Barriers, “Some Notes on Economy” does not speak of the existence of a Minimalist Program. “Some Notes on Economy” does, however, speak of “Minimizing Derivations” and “least effort” (426), terms that take on a major role later in the essay. 293 Oenbring / 317 major concern of generative theorists. It is, however, interesting to note that Chomsky’s Minimality Condition and Rizzi’s Minimality Principle are technical interactions among models in trees rather than broad methodological commitments. Like the GB/P and P revolution, which began by foregrounding the technical notions of government and binding before moving to the broader notions of principles and parameters, MP began by using minimalism as a tight methodological notion rather than a broad conceptual godterm / point of identity. Recall that Chomsky framed the move to the GB/P and P approach, as a movement to a new order of abstraction focusing on general principles rather than specifically-formulated rule systems. Accordingly, Chomsky begins “Some Notes on Economy” with invoking Principles and Parameters as a landmark; he presents the analysis he presents in the piece as a development of, not a movement beyond, GB/P and P. Emphasizing the revolutionary nature of the GB/P and P approach, Chomsky claims at the beginning of “Some Notes on Economy” that: The past few years have seen the development of an approach to the study of language that constitutes a fairly radical departure from the historical tradition, more than contemporary generative grammar at its origins. I am referring to the principles-and-parameters (P&P) approach, which questions the assumption that a particular language is, in essence, a specific rule system. (417) As this quote intimates, in “Some Notes on Economy,” Chomsky begins to unveil MP by the emphasizing the revolutionary advancements in the theory of generative grammar that occurred through GB/P and P’s emphasis on treating language according to the Oenbring / 318 interaction of broader principles rather than as specifically formulated rule systems, a notion that would become more developed under MP.294 Indeed, like with other programs, at the beginning of the Minimalist Program, Chomsky claimed continuity with the previous program before he later claimed rupture. Toward the end of “Some Notes on Economy,” Chomsky suggests that “least effort” may be a goal of future generative theorizing, claiming that “we may hope to raise these ‘least effort’ guidelines to general principles of UG” (447).295 Chomsky finally claims the advent of the MP in the title of his 1993 essay “A Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory,” originally published in Hale and Keyser’s edited volume The View from Building 20. Note that the title itself of the piece does the “proposing” of the system, and Chomsky’s invocations on the notion of the Minimalist Program in the piece can merely assume its existence; he need not directly propose it. Indeed, Chomsky’s specific phrasing when he first speaks of the notion of a Minimalist Program in the piece is that “a particularly simple design for language would take the (conceptually necessary) interface levels to be the only levels. That assumption will be part of the ‘minimalist’ program I would like to explore here” (169). (Indeed, Chomsky Chomsky’s 1991 essay with Lasnik “The Theory of Principles and Parameters” first published in the volume Syntax: An International Handbook of Contemporary Research, similarly frames the theories presented as a development within the Principles and Parameters approach. As in other essays, the goal of the early section of the piece seems to be to invoke and surround the reader in Chomsky’s quintessential terminology and points of identity. Indeed, Chomsky and Lasnik invoke all of the following concepts in the first three pages: grammar, Universal Grammar, competence/performance, infinite use of finite means, I-language. 295 At the same time, however, Chomsky emphasizes that his emphasis on notions of “least effort” does not mean he is endorsing the claim that language is designed to do things in the world. In fact, Chomsky claims that “language design … appears to be in many respects ‘dysfunctional,’ yielding properties that are not well adapted to the functions language is called on to perform” (448). However, Chomsky assures us that “there is no real paradox here” (448). 294 Oenbring / 319 invokes the conceptually necessary nature of a rich universal grammar several times in the piece.) Like in previous essays, Chomsky construes the move toward MP as a fulfillment of GB/P and P, arguing that “the more recent principles-and-parameters (P&P) approach, assumed here, breaks radically with this tradition, taking steps toward the minimalist design just sketched” (170). Following the rhetorical trick of Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (1972), Chomsky’s 1995 volume The Minimalist Program brings “Some Notes on Economy,” “The Theory of Principles and Parameters,” and “A Minimalist Program” together in a single rhetorical volley designed to foment a new saltation and or paradigm shift for the theory. This is despite the fact that the different chapters in the book, produced at different points, contradict one another at many points.296 (Indeed, although chapters one through three of the book use the layers of D-Structure and S-Structure in addition to LF and PF, chapter four dumps both former two from the model.) While most of the material of the book is these three republished essays, the volume includes a totally new (and substantial) fourth chapter “Categories and Transformations” as well as a new introduction. On the first page of the introduction of The Minimalist Program, Chomsky asserts what have come to be seen as the unique claims of the Minimalist Program; from the beginning of the piece, Chomsky makes clear what he sees to be the new main features of his new theory. Specifically, Chomsky states that: Indeed, as Seuren (2004) notes, the different chapters “reflect different positions with regard to some of the central issues in the book. Chapter 4 of the book dismisses most of what is said in the first three chapters” (20). 296 Oenbring / 320 This work is motivated by two related questions: (1) what are the general conditions that the human language faculty should be expected to satisfy? And (2) to what extent is the language faculty determined by these conditions, without special structure that lies beyond them? … To the extent that the answer to question (2) is positive, language is something like a “perfect system,” meeting external constraints as well as can be done, in one of the reasonable ways. The Minimalist Program for linguistic theory seeks to explore these possibilities. (The Minimalist Program 1) Like the book as a whole, the new chapter “Categories and Transformations,” begins with a statement of the unique features of MP; one of Chomsky’s main goals in the piece is to make clear exactly what the propositions of this new program that he’s unveiling are — and to make clear that there is a new program. In addition to dumping D-Structure and SStructure from the theory, Chomsky endorses a more basic form of x-bar theory in “Categories,” arguing that “standard X-bar theory is thus largely eliminated in favor of bare essentials” (246). What’s left is what Chomsky calls “bare phrase structure” (249). After the publication of The Minimalist Program, Chomsky worked to solidify his new revolution in his 1998 essay “Minimalist Inquiries: The Framework,” eventually published in the edited volume Step by Step (2000). Like Lectures on Government and Binding, “Minimalist Inquiries” early on pairs a claim of “collective effort” with a claim of individual authorship; the claims that he presents are legitimated both on the basis of his authority and on the basis of the broad consensus of the scholarly community (89). Like other works published right after foundational tomes of new theories (e.g., 1982’s Oenbring / 321 Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding), the primary task of “Minimalist Inquiries” is to articulate in a clear way the core claims of the previous text. With “Minimalist Inquiries,” Chomsky starts to make his 1995 book the core landmark in his brief genealogies of the generative grammar. Chomsky claims at the beginning of “Minimalist Inquiries” that: The remarks that follow are ‘inquiries,’ a term intended to stress their tentative character. They are “minimalist” in the sense of the “Minimalist Program,” itself explanatory as the term indicates, and its short career already developing in partially conflicting and attractive directions … Here, I will keep to general considerations, rethinking the issues that motivate the program and attempting to give a clearer account and further development from one point of view, taking as a starting point the final sections of Chomsky 1995b (henceforth MP). What’s more, in his 1999 paper “Derivation by Phase,” published in 2001 in the volume Ken Hale: A Life in Language, Chomsky adds “Minimalist Inquiries” as a primary landmark in the history of the theory, claiming that “what follows extends and revises an earlier paper (“Minimalist Inquiries,” MI), which outlines a framework for pursuit of the so-called ‘minimalist program’” (1). While in the nineties Chomsky claimed the notions LF and PF to be core elements of the Minimalist Program, he has, however, renamed these notions in his most recent publications; LF is now extricated from the model and has been replace by another dichotomy between distinct levels: the divide between SEM and PHON, or the Oenbring / 322 derivations that map to the two interfaces (that Chomsky previously labeled π and λ). Chomsky claims in his 2004 article “Beyond Explanatory Adequacy” that “there is no LF: rather, the computation maps LA to <PHON, SEM> piece by piece, cyclically. There are, therefore, no LF properties and no interpretation of LF, strictly speaking, though Σ and Φ interpret units that are part of something like LF in a noncyclic conception” (107). Like always, it is unclear what these new labels add to the model other than the appearance of novelty or progress in the theory. Nonetheless, we should not underestimate the enduring rhetorical power of Chomsky’s ever-shifting yet neat dichotomies between levels. That is to say, what Botha has called the generative garden game appears to be alive and well. The Reception of the Minimalist Program As in the past, many of Chomsky’s most ardent supporters (many of them his former graduate students) quickly and wholeheartedly embraced the core principles of the Minimalist Program. As I have noted, Rizzi’s Relativized Minimality did much to establish minimalism and economy as god-terms. After Chomsky’s 1995 book The Minimalist Program, supporters began to fall in line under the banner of the new set of organizing principles. Zwart’s 1998 review of Chomsky’s 1995 volume is typical in its hyperbole, claiming Chomsky’s book to be “a masterpiece” (Zwart 1998: 214, cited in Seuren 2004: 11). Even more modest assessments of Chomsky’s 1995 work often include hyperbolic claims designed to place the text at the core of generative inquiry. Brody’s somewhat critical, but still partisan assessment of The Minimalist Program, argues, for Oenbring / 323 example, that the volume “powerfully integrates several strands of research into an exciting and intellectually seductive novel view of the field” (205). Following the master’s lead, many works by Chomsky’s followers under MP include quotes from important figures in the history of science claiming something like an Ockham’s razor argument: that in science the simplest theory is the best theory. Epstein and Seeley, for example, claim in Derivations in Minimalism (2006) that “we include this discussion simply to identify our (undoubtedly unachieved but ultimate) goal, what Einstein (1954: 282) called ‘the grand aim of all science’: … which is to cover the greatest possible number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest possible number or hypotheses or axioms” (3). In using a decontextualized quote from one of the most famous scientists in history as support for the concerns of the current program of generative grammar, Epstein and Seeley are clearly borrowing a rhetorical trick from Chomsky. After the publication of The Minimalist Program, many supporters have wholeheartedly adopted Chomsky landmarks for the theory as presented in “Minimalist Inquiries” and other works. Wildner, Gärtener, and Bierswich claim at the beginning of their The Role of Economy Principles in Linguistic Theory that: Generative linguistics, it is fair to say, is dominated by developments in syntactic theory; and for the past few years, work in generative syntax has been heavily influenced by what has come to be known as ‘the Minimalist Program’ (MP). The seminal paper that ushered in the MP was Chomsky’s “A minimalist program for linguistic theory” (1993) … At the core of the MP lies the idea that economy Oenbring / 324 is a central property of the system of language. This is fleshed out in terms of concrete principles of UG that instantiate the overarching economy idea. (1) Similarly, Chomsky’s followers have followed the points of identity proposed in Chomsky’s work. For example, Di Sciullo’s edited volume UG and the External Systems invokes the notion of external systems in its title, both drawing on Chomsky’s works for its relevance and affirming the importance of notions of externals systems under UG. While few of the pieces deal explicitly with the notion of external systems, the volume establishes its relevance by invoking Chomsky’s current concerns. The Minimalist Program has, however, not led to as widespread assent as Chomsky’s previous putative scientific revolutions. Generative grammarians of various stripes have been concerned about several different elements of Chomsky’s theorizing under MP, including: the perfection claim; his increasingly cavalier attitude regarding evidence; and, as I note in the previous chapter, Chomsky’s ideas about evolution. MP critic Newmeyer notes that Chomsky’s ideas regarding evolution lead to a substantial rhetorical problem for generative linguists in the presentation of their theory. Specifically, Newmeyer (1998) claims that “one must concede that the absence of even the rudiments of an answer to this question [of evolution] has conferred a rhetorical advantage on those opposing the idea of an innate UG” (305).297 297 However, the biggest flare up to date over the status of MP among generative linguists was a 2000-2001 review article spat in the journal Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. On one side of the flare up stood Lappin, Levine, and Johnson (LLJ), a group that offered first a critique of Chomsky’s MP, and later a series responses to their critics. LLJ note in their original piece, the title invoking Kuhn, “The Structure of Unscientific Revolutions” that: Vagueness and imprecision are not exactly unknown in much of the history of linguistic theorizing. Taken in isolation the conceptual defects of the derivational economy notion are probably no worse in kind than earlier examples might be. What is altogether mysterious from a Oenbring / 325 The Autonomy Thesis and the Enduring Rhetorical Power of Dichotomies As Randy Harris notes, Chomsky’s original notion of deep structure “was a … compelling masterstroke” (“Assent, Dissent and Rhetoric in Science” 18) in that it succeeded in captivating the imagination of both linguists and non-linguists. However, Chomsky has since repudiated it for causing “confusion … at the periphery of the field,” (Language and Responsibility, cited in Harris 18). Like every previous program since the Current Issues era, however, MP proposes divides between hypothesized levels relating to meaning and other levels relating to sound — divides that seem to serve as the lynchpins of the program (e.g., LF / PF and A-P / C-I). As always, these divides are seemingly lacking empirical motivation and are clearly ideological. Indeed, despite the fact that Chomsky recognizes that the deep structure / surfaces structure divide is problematical, he still makes similar notions the core elements of his theory. If Chomsky includes dichotomies that he himself recognizes are clearly oversimplifications, his reasons must be rhetorical (or at bare minimum heuristic). purely scientific point of view is the rapidity with which a substantial number of investigators, who had significant research commitments in the Government-Binding framework, have abandoned that framework and much of its conceptual inventory, virtually overnight. (667) As this quote suggests, one of the primary concerns of LLJ’s piece is how and why so many researchers would discard old theory in favor of the new theory, a theory that is by no means any more empirically adequate, seemingly overnight. LLJ are equally concerned with the proliferation of mendacious metaphors from the physical sciences within MP advocacy, focusing in particular on Uriagereka’s Rhyme and Reason. After LLJ’s original piece, a number of proud exponents of the Minimalist Program, including Uriagereka and Piattelli-Palmarini, issued responses, often focusing on LLJ’s lack of acknowledgement of dissent from Chomsky in the field, all while rearticulating first principles supporting MP. Oenbring / 326 Recall that Chomsky has long claimed that broader principles of cognition and biology (e.g., perception and the physiology of articulation) should not play a role in linguistics as those concepts are too imprecise to the rigorously formulated. Moreover, Chomsky has long claimed that the discipline of psychology has little to add to the discipline of linguistics (this is despite mentalism’s places as a guarded point of identity for linguistics). As psychological (i.e., physiological) evidence is not admissible, this, according to Chomsky, builds the raison d’être for linguistics as an autonomous science. The prominent place given to the C-I (Conceptual-Intentional) and A-P (ArticulatoryPerceptual [now renamed S-M, or Sensory-Motor]) interfaces under MP would, however, seem to constitute a disavowal of the autonomy thesis; one might read Chomsky’s concern with such levels as an acknowledgment of the place that these broader cognitive and biological notions play within linguistics. Nonetheless, Chomsky is having his broader principles of biology on his own terms: they manifest themselves in Chomsky’s rhetoric couched in the form of a neat dichotomy between idealized levels. What’s more, these interfaces are the external boundaries of generative inquiry; they are goals of generative descriptions, not parts of its core machinery. Furthermore, as I note in the previous chapter, the fact that one of Chomsky’s most recent publications is with two psychologists (e.g., his recent 2002 article in Science with psychologists Hauser and Fitch “The Faculty of Language”) would seem to suggest that Chomsky is ceding ground to broader principles of cognition and biology. However, upon closer examination this appears not to be the case. In fact, the main purpose of the article is to propose yet another idealized dichotomy between levels. The piece divides Oenbring / 327 between a broader, yet idealized category of the FLB (the faculty of language — broad sense) of which the C-I and S-M interfaces are subcomponents, and the FLN (the faculty of language — narrow sense), an element that’s sole feature is recursion (read: syntax). That is to say, Chomsky, Hauser, and Fitch keep syntax as an autonomous system, all while framing their piece as an intervention in broader biological discourse, by drawing a dichotomy between an idealized system of syntax and broader biological principles. Indeed, the rhetorical value of the FLN / FLB dichotomy for Chomsky is clear: Chomsky can have his biology and his touch of God at the same time. The Present: A Return to Rhetoric? If the existent is the same as the nonexistent, it is not possible for both to exist. For if both exist, they are not the same, and if the same, both do not exist. To which the conclusion follows that nothing exists. For if neither the existent exists nor the nonexistent nor both, and if no additional possibility is conceivable, nothing exists. Gorgias, “On Nonexistence” Much as seminal analytic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein took a turn near the end of his life toward considering how the specific language practices of specific areas of practice, including philosophical inquiry, bewitch specific the practice of life in all areas298 — a turn that led to the development of a more self-reflexive brand of philosophical inquiry, what has been called ‘therapeutic philosophy’ in meta-discourse 298 See Wittgenstein’s posthumously published Philosophical Investigations. Oenbring / 328 surrounding Wittgenstein’s work — so has Chomsky under the Minimalist Program made nods toward self-reflective analysis of the specific methods that generative grammarians use, all while hedging many of his realist claims. While Chomsky, like Wittgenstein before him, have both at the end of their careers apparently ceded some grounds to notions of rhetoric, Chomsky has not gone near as far as the later Wittgenstein. Echoing discourse surrounding Wittgenstein’s later work, in the fourth chapter of The Minimalist Program, Chomsky speaks of the “therapeutic value” (233) of the Minimalist Program, noting that “it is all too easy to succumb to the temptation to offer a purported explanation for some phenomenon on basis of assumptions that are roughly on the order of complexity of what is to be explained” (233). Chomsky’s phrasing is circumspect, but at its core Chomsky seems to be acknowledging a claim that critics of generative grammar have been making for decades: that many of its purported descriptions offer nothing more than tautology. While Chomsky maintains a commitment to realism, his realism has become much more equivocal under MP. For example, despite espousing the one great mutation theory of the evolution of UG, Chomsky admits his instantaneous evolution hypothesis is a “fairy tale” (Architecture of Language 4).299 Indeed, Chomsky in recent years routinely Specifically, Chomsky claims in The Architecture of Language that “to tell a fairy tale about it, it is almost as if there was some higher primate wandering about a long time ago and some random mutation took place, maybe after some strange cosmic ray shower, and it reorganized the brain, implanting a language organ in an otherwise primate brain” (Architecture of Language 4). 299 Oenbring / 329 peppers his speeches on linguistics with hedges and/or anti-foundational claims.300 (Recall Chomsky’s recent claims [represented in Barsky (1997)] that he has never held the autonomy thesis [this is probably due to the fact that the autonomy thesis, despite 300 As I have noted, Chomsky has, under the Minimalist Program, made moves to lay a new monist foundation for generative grammar while frequently making unequivocally antifoundational statements, often in very close quarters to his monist claims. That is to say, Chomsky has become more willing to accept under MP the idea that scholarly descriptions of nature may be always already theory-laden. The following long passage from On Nature and Language is somewhat cryptic, but especially rich: Mind-body dualism is no longer tenable, because there is no notion of body. It is common in recent years to ridicule Descartes’ “ghost in the machine,” and to speak of “Descartes’s error” in postulating a second substance: mind, distinct from body. It is true that Descartes was proven wrong, but not for those reasons. Newton exorcised the machine; he left the ghost intact. It was the first substance, extended matter, that dissolved into mysteries. We can speak intelligibly of physical phenomena (processes, etc.) as we speak of the real truth or the real world. For the natural sciences, there are mental aspects of the world, along with optical, chemical, organic, and others. The categories need not be firm or distinct, or conform to commonsense intuition, a standard for science that was finally abandoned with Newton’s discoveries, along with the demand for “intelligibility” as conceived by Galileo and early modern science generally. (53) This is a particularly interesting passage for several reasons. While, as I have argued, Chomsky’s rhetorical work under MP has attempted to position generative grammar as purging the ghost in the machine, Chomsky, referring to Newton’s theory of action at a distance (see, for example, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate 8), argues here that Newton, the expositor of a physical system, Newtonian mechanics, so precise that ever since its introduction centuries ago has been the envy of all academic fields (at least till the 20th century), “excorcised the machine” but “left the ghost intact.” By this move Chomsky is attempting to point out that all descriptions of nature are ultimately theory-laden and that theories of nature may never be perfectly autonomous, intelligible, and robust. It is, indeed, interesting that Chomsky has chosen to frame Newton’s work as supporting anti-foundational notions, as Newtonian mechanics has generally been understood as a paragon of methodological precision (at least till the advent of the theory of relativity). I argue that by framing Newton’s system anti-foundationally (i.e., framing it as a theory-laden system) Chomsky is working rhetorically to suggest the theory-laden nature of all knowledge, thereby weakening arguments against generative grammar that have suggested it to be merely a language-game (see, for example, Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things). By arguing that all descriptions of nature are theory-laden, even a system that it usually seen as totally robust like Newton’s, Chomsky can weaken arguments against generative grammar that claim that it is an unfruitful mode of inquiry. That is to say, Chomsky paints generative grammar as a language game among many, a language game that is somewhat unique in that it is part of naturalistic inquiry. Oenbring / 330 being an organizing idea for the community of generative grammarians, clearly isn’t true in its purest form]). At the same time, however, Chomsky has under MP attempted to emphasize the fundamentally biological nature of linguists’ descriptions, promoting biolinguistics as a point of identity for linguists in his recent speeches and writings. Indeed, biolinguistics is a recurrent theme of Chomsky’s recent stump speeches that he gives in various forms at talks all over the world.301 As such, Chomsky’s biolinguistic claims would seem to constitute a renewed commitment to realism. While increasing his anti-foundational/anti-realist claims at the same time he is increasing his language as biology claims may seem to make the recent Chomsky strangely Janus-faced, we might attempt to reconcile these two sets of claims by considering an assertion that Chomsky has made several times before, but not prominently under MP: that the shape and form of possible scientific knowledge is highly constrained by the human genetic endowment (i.e., that scientific knowledge is limited by what he has called the human science-forming capacity). Chomsky suggests, for example, in Language and Problems of Knowledge the “partial congruence between the truth about the world and what the human science-forming capacity produces at a given moment yields science. Notice that it is just blind luck if the human science-forming For example, Chomsky’s 2004 speech in Hungary to the Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, now reproduced on the web, “Biolinguistics and the Human Capacity” begins as follows: “I would like to say a few words about what has come to be called “the biolinguistic perspective,” which began to take shape half a century ago in discussions among a few graduate students who were much influenced by developments in biology and mathematics in the early postwar years, including work in ethology that was just coming to be known in the United States. One of them was Eric Lenneberg, whose seminal 1967 study Biological Foundations of Language remains a basic document of the field” (“Biolinguistics and the Human Capacity”). 301 Oenbring / 331 capacity, a particular component of the human biological endowment, happens to yield a result that conforms more or less to the truth about the world” (157-158). As we see in this quote, Chomsky has claimed that the shape and form of scientific theories is severely limited by the human genetic endowment. That is to say, the shape and form of scientific knowledge is, ultimately, an accident of biology. This is, for certain, a strange and slippery claim for someone putatively stalwartly defending science and the enlightenment, as Chomsky and his followers sometimes like to paint his work. (Recall, for example, Chomsky’s recent putative undressings of charlatan postmodernists.) Nonetheless, Chomsky’s attempts to marshal both hedging anti-realist notions and the alluring idea of biolinguistics during different works during the same time period (or even during different points in the same works) should all be recognized as strategic maneuvers: rhetoric. Similarly, although Chomsky makes no doubt that minimalism is the thesis he prefers, he often goes to great lengths to avoid espousing it in its purest form — as the claims of MP are, in their strongest forms, clearly indefensible — yet another slippery rhetorical maneuver. Chomsky, for example, acknowledges in the public discussion presented in On Nature and Language that “if you want to know what seems to refute the strong minimalist thesis, the answer is just about everything you can think of or pick at random from a corpus of material” (On Nature and Language 127). That is to say, just about everything appears to be evidence against the claim that languages are perfect systems. Oenbring / 332 Indeed, Chomsky consistently divides between a “Strong Minimalist Thesis” and a less radical and more plausible “weaker version” of the theory. Chomsky, like with the FLN / FLB divide, draws dichotomy between a perfect idealized system on the one side and a more plausible version on the other (what we might call a dichotomy between touch of God and touch of reality). Indeed, Chomsky continues to exploit the rhetorical power of the dichotomy. Chomsky suggests, for example, in “Derivation by Phase” that: The strongest minimalist thesis SMT would hold that language is an optimal solution to such conditions. SMT, or a weaker version, becomes an empirical thesis insofar as we are able to determine interface conditions and to clarify notions of “good-design.” While SMT cannot be seriously entertained, there is by now reason to believe that in nontrivial respects some such thesis holds, a surprising conclusion insofar as it is true, with broad implications for the study of language, and well beyond.” (3) Although “SMT cannot be seriously entertained,” the basic notion of minimalism still, according to Chomsky, has value. Chomsky nimbly dances around the strong minimalist thesis in other publications too, including his 2006 manuscript “Approaching UG from Below.” There Chomsky suggests that “one useful way to approach the problem from below is to entertain the strong minimalist thesis SMT” (3, emphasis added). We can, according to his idiom “formulate a SMT” for the purposes of inquiry, even if the notion in its purest sense clearly isn’t true. In many ways this is remarkably similar to Chomsky’s rhetorical maneuvers around the notion of autonomous syntax in the seventies. There he suggested that “one Oenbring / 333 might formulate a ‘thesis of autonomy of formal grammar’ of varying degrees of strength” (Essays on Form and Interpretation 42, emphasis added). What’s more, “we can distinguish, then, two version of an autonomy thesis: an absolute thesis, which holds that the theory of linguistic form, including the concept, ‘formal grammar’ and all levels apart from semantic representation, can be fully defined in terms of formal primitives, and a weaker version, which holds that this is true only conditionally, with certain parameters, perhaps localized in the dictionary” (42-43). In his work to defend generative grammar, Chomsky divided between an absolute autonomy thesis, and a weaker autonomy thesis. (Also recall his recent disavowal of the autonomy thesis.) Interestingly, in both his recent maneuvering regarding the SMT and in his earlier contortions regarding the notion of the autonomy of syntax, Chomsky has been able to espouse bold theses serving to organize the community of generative grammarians all while avoiding asserting those theses in their purist, absurdist forms. That is to say, Chomsky offers up these theses as points of identity for the community of generative grammarians despite recognizing that, in their purest forms these notions cannot be true. This is a fascinating rhetorical maneuver, a maneuver that, for certain, only a scholar of great authority could get away with. Indeed, Kierkegaard’s take on Socrates that serves as an epigraph to this chapter seems to apply perfectly to Chomsky: his idealism is seemingly otherworldly and yet he still somehow has a foot on the ground in ours; he is both a philosopher and a sophist.302 302 However, a generative grammarian up on their Kierkegaard might point out that that Kierkegaard’s next line after “the one would make Socrates a philosopher, the other a Sophist” is Oenbring / 334 A Final Assessment: Chomsky as Rhetor Pictorial Representation of Word Frequencies in this Dissertation Figure 3 As his recent dealings with the notion of the Strong Minimalist Thesis demonstrate, Chomsky has never shied away from engaging in what must be called daring rhetorical maneuvers. Certainly promoting a thesis as a point of identity for a group of would-be scientists while stating directly that the thesis, in its purest form, is incorrect should properly be described as a daring rhetorical maneuver. The same goes for Chomsky’s espousal of rationalism, a philosophical system generally decried as metaphysical by contemporary philosophers in the fifties and sixties. And his persistent “but what makes him more than a Sophist is that his empirical I has universal validity” (21, bold added). Oenbring / 335 interventions in political discussions — especially his strongly anti-Zionist positions, given the fact that he is Jewish. These bold rhetorical moves have, as a whole, helped Chomsky construct ruptures of identity. That is to say, the boldness of Chomsky’s claims build the appearance that what he is offering is something bold and totally new. Indeed, it is easy to have the following response to Chomsky’s work: that if someone is saying something that appears to be this radical and this bold it must be both novel and profound. That is to say, we grant contrarians extra scope. As I have noted, the ultimate effect of Chomsky’s work as scholar/rhetor has since the sixties been more to change how the discipline of linguistics understands itself than to substantively change the methods of linguistics and generative grammar; his primary target has been the disciplinary identity of generative grammar and linguistics as a whole. This is a style of rhetoric that he continues up to the present. Indeed, as recently as his 2006 manuscript “Approaching UG from Below,” Chomsky has attempted to build another putative revolution (or at least to marshal another revolutionary rhetorical frame). Quite literally claiming that MP has turned generative grammar and the discipline of linguistics on its head, Chomsky notes early on in “Approaching UG” that: Throughout the modern history of generative grammar, the problem of determining the character of FL has been approached “from top down”: How much must be attributed to UG to account for language acquisition? The MP seeks to approach the problem “from bottom up”: How little can be attributed to UG while still accounting for the variety of I-languages attained, relying on third Oenbring / 336 factor principles? The two approaches should, of course, converge, and should interact in the course of pursuing a common goal. (3) Of course, an (at least rhetorical) focus on using as little apparatus as possible to describe human syntax is something that has existed in the MP for quite awhile; Chomsky’s suggestion that the MP approaches UG from a bottom up rather than top down manner is merely a new way to talk about MP rather than a new goal for MP. That is to say, it is a rhetorical rather than a substantive revolution. Chomsky’s numerous putative scientific revolutions in the study of language have, along with his persistent political interventions, worked to build his revolutionary ethos. This revolutionary ethos we might also call a posture of dissidence. Collectively, Chomsky’s revolutionary ethos and posture of dissidence have served to support his authority as guru/prophet; they have served to support Chomsky’s authority as an individual author. (Although, as I note in my extended analysis of Saussure’s Cours in the introduction, it is common for academic fields to read more author into texts than is actually there, Chomsky has done much to support his own authorship cult.) While Chomsky has relied heavily on novelty claims and the posture of dissidence, he has also routinely invoked the authority of tradition. This emphasis on historical precursors has been particularly common in his work aimed at general academic audiences. In fact, Chomsky continues to spin tales that claim for generative grammar the authority of tradition up to the present. For example, Chomsky claims at the beginning of “Approaching UG” that “the problem that has virtually defined the serious study of language since its ancient origins, if only implicitly, is to identify the Oenbring / 337 specific nature of this distinctive human possession” (1). This longstanding emphasis on the “specific nature of this distinctive human possession” Chomsky connects to the contemporary concerns of to what he calls the biolinguistic perspective, a newfound point of identity for linguistics that Chomsky promotes in recent pieces. Defining generative phonology against post-Bloomfieldian ‘structuralist’ phonemics, Chomsky reads the notions of biolinguistics and economy (which though present was not a god-term until recently) back into early generative work. Chomsky claims, for example, in “Approaching UG” that: Within the biolinguistic framework, methodological considerations of simplicity, elegance, etc., can often be reframed as empirical theses concerning organic systems generally. For example, Morris Halle’s classical argument against postulating a linguistic level of structuralist phonemics was that it required unmotivated redundancy of rules, taken to be a violation of natural methodological assumptions. Similarly conclusions about ordering and cyclicity of phonological and syntactic rule systems from the 1950s were justified on the methodological grounds that they reduce descriptive complexity and eliminate stipulations. (1) As we see in this quote, Chomsky uses the notions of organic systems and biolinguistics, a current god-term, to describe the state of generative inquiry in the fifties despite the fact that these terms were not part of the vocabulary of the day; Chomsky reads these notions back into earlier work in order to frame the entire project as a unified whole. (Recall that Oenbring / 338 appeals to psychology [and thus biology] played no role in the claims of generative grammar until the sixties.) What’s more, in spite of his dualist tendencies (and even rhetorical maneuvers) throughout most of his career, Chomsky currently uses his current monist / materialist rhetorical framework to renew the revolutionary impetus of generative work. Chomsky continues in the same passage in “Approaching,” arguing that: In such cases, the issues can be recast as metaphysical rather than epistemological: Is that how the world works? The issues can then be subjected to comparative analysis and related to principles of biology more generally, and perhaps even more fundamental principles about the natural world; clearly a step forward, if feasible. Such options become open, in principle at least, if the inquiry is taken to be the study of a real object, a biological organ, comparable to the visual or immune systems. (1) As this quote suggests, Chomsky collapses language into biology and biology into physical systems, reading one of the primary claims of the MP as an essential feature of the entire program of generative grammar. As this example intimates, at each point in the history of generative grammar Chomsky has attempted to claim continuity for his project; he has attempted at each point in the history of generative grammar to frame the whole project as a coherent, logical whole. The most important element of Chomsky’s rhetorical framing of the project of generative grammar has been how he has told the history of generative grammar, emphasizing the revolutionary nature of several of his different programs for generative Oenbring / 339 grammar. As I have noted, Chomsky has often done this by setting up the postBloomfieldians, particularly Zellig Harris, as straw men against which to define his own project. Similarly, in the interest of presenting his project as coherent, Chomsky has been very careful about how he has managed his changes of position and his appropriation of others’ ideas. As I have demonstrated, Chomsky has consistently borrowed ideas from others without properly acknowledging his sources (recall, for example, how semantic roles were incorporated into the model under EST and GB/P and P); he and his followers present their ideas as totally sui generis. Likewise, Chomsky has been careful not to admit that he is changing his mind. As these latter points suggest, as a rhetor Chomsky has not only been willing to engage in daring and bold claims (e.g., alluring dichotomies and grand ruptures), but has also been quite rhetorically disciplined when he needs to be. As I have suggested, Chomsky has been careful to stick to talking points; he has, for certain periods of time stuck to clear sets of claims and points of identity / god-terms, in effect offering them up for followers to use as well. Furthermore, Chomsky has paid attention to the target audience of his publications: for general audiences he has made appeals to the authority of tradition, often invoking ‘classic’ figures in science and philosophy; for technical audiences he has carefully managed his captivating terminology, all while promoting technical apparatus serving to isolate the community of generative grammarians from non-specialists. Even expository techniques as small as articulating his most important points within the first few pages of his texts have apparently not escaped his attention; he Oenbring / 340 almost always introduces his most important and alluring notions within the first ten pages. Indeed, Chomsky’s discipline as a rhetor has helped him dominate the discipline of linguistics. While having a well-funded graduate program at a prestigious university doesn’t hurt if one has ambitions to guide or even dominate a particular academic field, the evidence suggests that much of Chomsky’s success can be attributed to his success as a rhetor. Of course, as a rhetorician, I see rhetoric as not necessarily a bad thing. Rather, rhetoric is unavoidable. Indeed, in the case of the analysis of Chomsky I have provided in this study, I only mean rhetoric in a partially critical manner; I see Chomsky as a brilliant rhetor — in addition to being a brilliant linguist. Although it is late in the game to admit it, in this study I do not mean disparage those who believe that it is possible for inquiry to be beyond the realm of rhetoric: for inquiry to be truly scientific. The innumerable studies over the past half century that have been inspired by Chomsky work and person have each provided nuggets of insight, insight that is leading inquiry somewhere. Indeed, as Seuren concedes in Chomsky’s Minimalism, a book that must, as a whole, be recognized as a skewering of Chomsky’s most recent program: True, most science is subject to social value systems and subjective elements of evaluation and appreciation — even, one has to admit, to prejudices. It also has to fit into current sociological conditions, or else it will fail to attract good intellects. Yet it goes too far to deny science all lasting objective value and give rhetoric free play. No matter what limiting factors play a role in the development of science, Oenbring / 341 there always is a core of what we want to consider good work of lasting value which will always retain validity, though it may be supplemented with work motivated by other perspectives or even supplanted by theories place in a wider and more general context. (10) While Seuren does not approach the questions of Chomsky’s methods and scientific inquiry from the perspective of rhetoric, I agree with him wholeheartedly. Despite limiting factors, there always is a core to scientific inquiry that retains value. To put this another way, we can say that although it does not occur in a predetermined, teleological manner, science eventually builds knowledge. To recognize that inquiry is always already laden with rhetoric is not, furthermore, to give rhetoric free play. Rather, awareness of how language practices constrain and produce our thinking as scholars should be part and parcel of good scholarship. In this study I hope to have provided at least some fresh insight into the project of a scholar about whom innumerable words have already been written, and likely many more words will be written, a scholar whose total citation count places him among the ranks of Shakespeare, Marx, and Freud (a number that this study has only increased). Good or bad, Chomsky’s influence on the field of linguistics and nearby fields like philosophy and psychology has been profound. As a rhetor, Chomsky has always been dynamic, daring, and innovative; he has always been, for lack of a better word, revolutionary. While his influence on the field may have waned in the past few years, one can say for certain that any future publications in the area of linguistic theory he will produce will likely be scoured for insight by a substantial portion of the field of Oenbring / 342 linguistics. Whether Chomsky has another revolution left in him — or whether the community of linguists would be able to tolerate another revolution — is unclear. Nevertheless, despite losing a number of his boldest supporters in recent years, Chomsky continues to innovate and, in many ways, remains thoroughly realist (read: scientific) in his core beliefs and rhetoric; Chomsky remains, characteristically, as bold as ever. Oenbring / 343 Works Cited Aarsleff, Hans. “The History of Linguistics and Professor Chomsky.” Language 46 (1970): 570-585. Akmajian, Adrian, et al. Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979. Anderson, Stephen. Phonology in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. Aristotle. On Rhetoric. Trans. and Ed. George Kennedy. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Bach, Emmon. An Introduction to Transformational Grammars. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Speech Genres and other Late Essays. Trans. Vern McGee. 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